A Repository for C. A. Howard's Brain Traffic

Da Luigi, the restaurant in this photo, is not far from the Blue Grotto on Capri. If I had only one afternoon to live, I think I would like to spend it here. Drift on in to the little cove in the boat you've hired for the day, drop anchor, and await the restaurant's launch that will bring you in to the sunbathing area. This is where I like to look around to see if my future wife is in attendance. From there, a chatty Italian waiter will escort you to your table, where you are encouraged to while away the afternoon over delicious food, wine, and plates of olives, prosciutto, and parmigiano.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Sometimes I wish I only posted one column per week on the blogaroo in order to increase the likelihood of its being read by my glitteringly intelligent and curious reader base.

Here's one by Charles Krauthammer that would qualify. Krauthammer is, by a longshot, the most objective, crystal-clear, articulate, level-headed, unemotional analyst of foreign policy I know of. Hands-down. There are other great columnists I love who are witty, intelligent, and enjoyable, but Charles Krauthammer deserves to be read by all serious students and policy analysts at the highest levels.

"No one can spend some 10 days visiting the battlefields in Iraq without seeing major progress in every area. . . . If the U.S. provides sustained support to the Iraqi government — in security, governance, and development — there is now a very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state."— Anthony Cordesman,

"The Situation in Iraq: A Briefing From the Battlefield," Feb. 13, 2008

This from a man who was a severe critic of the postwar occupation of Iraq and who, as author Peter Wehner points out, is no wide-eyed optimist. In fact, in May 2006 Cordesman had written that "no one can argue that the prospects for stability in Iraq are good." Now, however, there is simply no denying the remarkable improvements in Iraq since the surge began a year ago.

Unless you're a Democrat. As Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) put it, "Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq." Their Senate leader, Harry Reid, declares the war already lost. Their presidential candidates (eight of them at the time)unanimously oppose the surge. Then the evidence begins trickling in.

We get news of the Anbar Awakening, which has now spread to other Sunni areas and Baghdad. The sectarian civil strife that the Democrats insisted was the reason for us to leave dwindles to the point of near disappearance. Much of Baghdad is returning to normal. There are 90,000 neighborhood volunteers — ordinary citizens who act as auxiliary police and vital informants on terrorist activity — starkly symbolizing the insurgency's loss of popular support. Captured letters of al-Qaeda leaders reveal despair as they are driven — mostly by Iraqi Sunnis, their own Arab co-religionists — to flight and into hiding.

After agonizing years of searching for the right strategy and the right general, we are winning. How do Democrats react? From Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama, the talking point is the same: Sure, there is military progress. We could have predicted that. (They in fact had predicted the opposite, but no matter.) But it's allpointless unless you get national reconciliation.

"National" is a way to ignore what is taking place at the local and provincial level, such as Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim, scion of the family that dominates the largest Shiite party in Iraq, traveling last October to Anbar in an unprecedented gesture of reconciliation with the Sunni sheiks.

Doesn't count, you see. Democrats demand nothing less than federal-level reconciliation, and it has to be expressed in actual legislation.

The objection was not only highly legalistic but also politically convenient: Very few (including me) thought this would be possible under the Maliki government. Then last week, indeed on the day Cordesman published his report, it happened. Mirabile dictu, the Iraqi parliament approved three very significant pieces of legislation.

First, a provincial powers law that turns Iraq into arguably the most federal state in the entire Arab world. The provinces get not only power but also elections by Oct. 1. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has long been calling this the most crucial step to political stability. It will allow, for example, the pro-American Anbar sheiks to become the legitimate rulers of their province, exercise regional autonomy and forge official relations with the Shiite-dominated central government.

Second, parliament passed a partial amnesty for prisoners, 80 percent of whom are Sunni. Finally, it approved a $48 billion national budget that allocates government revenue — about 85 percent of which is from oil — to the provinces. Kurdistan, for example, gets one-sixth.

What will the Democrats say now? They will complain that there is still no oil distribution law. True. But oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces in the national budget. The fact that parliament could not agree on a permanent formula for the future simply means thatit will be allocating oil revenue year by year as part of the budget process. Is that a reason to abandon Iraq to al-Qaeda and Iran?

Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our "very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state."

Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a warthey insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?

. . . . By now, the Democratic Party's ideas are largely generic. Everyone noticed that the Democratic presidential candidates were largely singing from the same script. Health care, public schools, green energy, the eternal shafting of the middle class, the unions, protecting Social Security and Medicare. This common script means that the Democratic primaries are largely an audition. The candidates are reading for a role. The lines are known.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Capt. Denny Keast flies for UAL and flew many SAMs (Special Air Missions) for the White House:

I flew 4 Presidential support missions in the C-141 out of Dover AFB, DE. Two for President Johnson and two for President Nixon.

Johnson was a first class jerk and on the two occasions I flew for him, if the Secret Service and their Liaison in the Pentagon hadn't intervened, we would have had to stay on the airplane for hours while he ( Johnson) was off somewhere. Nixon never required that and the four (4) stops we made with him, he was cordial to the Secret Service and to me and my crew.

We had a neighbor when I lived in DC who was part of the secret service presidential detail for many years. His stories of Kennedy and Johnson were the same as those I heard from the guys who flew the presidents' plane.

Yes, Kennedy did have Marilyn Monroe flown in for secret "dates," and LBJ was a typical Texas "good ole boy" womanizer. Nixon, Bush 41, and Carter never cheated on their wives. Clinton cheated, but couldn't match Kennedy or LBJ in style or variety.

The information below is accurate: The elder Bush and current president Bush make it a point to thank and take care of the air crews who fly them around. When the president flies, there are several planes that also go, one carries the armored limo, another the security detail, plus usually a press aircraft.

Both Bushes made it a point to stay home on holidays, so the Air Force and security people could have a day with their families.

Hillary Clinton was arrogant and orally abusive to her security detail. She forbade her daughter, Chelsea , from exchanging pleasantries with them. Sometimes Chelsea , miffed at her mother's obvious conceit and mean spiritedness, ignored her demands and exchanged pleasantries regardless, but never in her mother's presence. Chelsea really was a nice, kindhearted, and lovely young lady. The consensus opinion was that Chelsea loved her Mom but did not like her. Hillary Clinton was continuously rude and abrasive to those who were charged to protect her life. Her security detail dutifully did their job, as professionals should, but they all loathed her and wanted to be on a different detail.

Hillary Clinton was despised by the Secret Service as a whole. Former President Bill Clinton was much more amiable than his wife. Often the Secret Service would cringe at the verbal attacks Hillary would use against her husband. They were embarrassed for his sake by the manner and frequency in which she verbally insulted him, sometimes in the presence of the Secret Service, and sometimes behind closed doors. Even behind closed doors Hillary Clinton would scream and holler so loudly that everyone could hear what she was saying. Many felt sorry for President Clinton and most wondered why he tolerated it instead of just divorcing his "attack dog" wife. It was crystal clear that the Clinton 's neither liked nor respected each other and this was true long before the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Theirs was genuinely a "marriage of convenience."

Chelsea was much closer to her father than her mother, even after the Lewinsky scandal, which hurt her gravely. Bill Clinton did in fact have charisma, and occasionally would smile at or shake hands with his security detail. Still, he always displayed an obvious air of superiority towards them. His security detail uniformly believed him to be disingenuous, false, and that he did nothing without a motive that in some way would enhance his image and political career. He was polite, but not kind. They did not particularly like him and nobody trusted him.

Al Gore was the male version of Hillary Clinton.. They were friendlier toward each other than either of them were towards former President Clinton. They were not intimate, so please don't read that in. They were very close in a political way. Tipper Gore was generally nice and pleasant. She initially liked Hillary but soon after the election she had her "pegged" and no longer liked her or associated with her except for events that were politically obligatory.

Al Gore was far more left wing than Bill Clinton. Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was too "centrist." He despised all Republicans. His hatred was bitter and this was long before he announced for the Presidency. This hatred was something that he and Hillary had in common. They often said as much, even in the presence of their security detail. Neither of them trusted Bill Clinton and, the Secret Service opined, neither of them even liked him. Bill Clinton did have some good qualities, whereas Al Gore and Hillary had none, in the view of their security details.

Al Gore, like Hillary, was very rude and arrogant toward his security detail. He was extremely unappreciative and would not hesitate to scold them in the presence of their peers for minor details over which they had no control. Al Gore also looked down on them, as they finally observed and learned with certainty on one occasion. Al got angry at his offspring and pointed at his security detail and said, "Do you want to grow up and be like them?" Word of this insult by the former Vice-President quickly spread and he became as disliked by the Secret Service as Hillary. Most of them prayed Al Gore would not be elected President, and they really did have private celebrations in a few of their homes after President Bush won. This was not necessarily to celebrate President Bush's election, but to celebrate Al Gore's defeat.

Everyone in the Secret Service wants to be on First Lady Laura Bush's detail. Without exception, they concede that she is perhaps the nicest and most kind person they have ever had the privilege of serving. Where Hillary patently refused to allow her picture to be taken with her security detail, Laura Bush doesn't even have to be asked, she offers. She doesn't just shake their hand and say, "Thank you." Very often, she will give members of her detail a kindhearted hug to express her appreciation. There is nothing false about her. This is her genuine nature. Her security detail considers her to be a "breath of fresh air." They joke that comparing Laura Bush with Hillary Clinton is like comparing "Mother Teresa" with the "Wicked Witch of the North."

Likewise, the Secret Service considers President Bush to be a gem of a man to work for. He always treats them with genuine respect and he always trusts and listens to their expert advice. They really like the Crawford, Texas detail. Every time the president goes to Crawford he has a Bar-B-Q for his security detail and he helps serve their meals. He sits with them, eats with them, and talks with them. He knows each of them by their first name, and calls them by their first name as a show of affection. He always asks about their family, the names of which he always remembers. They believe that he is deeply and genuinely appreciative of their service. They could not like, love, or respect anyone more than President Bush. Most of them did not know they would feel this way, until they had an opportunity to work for him and learn that his manner was genuine and consistent. It has never changed since he began his Presidency. He always treats them with the utmost respect, kindness, and compassion.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Senator Barack Obama is very gloomy about America, and he’s aligning himself with the liberal wing of the Democratic party in hopes of coming to the nation’s rescue. His proposal? Big-government planning, spending, and taxing -- exactly what the nation and the stock market doesn’t want to hear.

Obama unveiled much of his economic strategy in Wisconsin this week: He wants to spend $150 billion on a green-energy plan. He wants to establish an infrastructure investment bank to the tune of $60 billion. He wants to expand health insurance by roughly $65 billion. He wants to “reopen” trade deals, which is another way of saying he wants to raise the barriers to free trade. He intends to regulate the profits for drug companies, health insurers, and energy firms. He wants to establish a mortgage-interest tax credit. He wants to double the number of workers receiving the earned-income tax credit (EITC) and triple the EITC benefit for minimum-wage workers.

The Obama spend-o-meter is now up around $800 billion.And tax hikes on the rich won’t pay for it. It’s the middle class that will ultimately shoulder this fiscal burden in terms of higher taxes and lower growth.

This isn’t free enterprise. It’s old-fashioned-liberal tax, and spend, and regulate. It’s plain ol’ big government. The only people who will benefit are the central planners in Washington.

Obama would like voters to believe that he’s the second coming of JFK. But with his unbelievable spending and new-government-agency proposals he’s looking more and more like Jimmy Carter. His is a “Grow the Government Bureaucracy Plan,” and it’s totally at odds with investment and business.

Obama says he wants U.S. corporations to stop “shipping jobs overseas” and bring their cash back home. But if he really wanted U.S. companies to keep more of their profits in the states he’d be calling for a reduction in the corporate tax rate. Why isn’t hedemanding an end to the double-taxation of corporate earnings? It’s simple: He wants higher taxes, too.

The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore has done the math on Obama’s tax plan. He says it will add up to a 39.6 percent personal income tax, a 52.2 percent combined income and payroll tax, a 28 percent capital-gains tax, a 39.6 percent dividends tax, and a 55percent estate tax.

Not only is Obama the big-spending candidate, he’s also the very-high-tax candidate. And what he wants to tax is capital.

Doesn’t Obama understand the vital role of capital formation in creating businesses and jobs? Doesn’t he understand that without capital, businesses can’t expand their operations and hire more workers?

Dan Henninger, writing in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, notes that Obama’s is a profoundly pessimistic message. “Strip away the new coat of paint from the Obama message and what you find is not only familiar,” writes Henninger. “It’s a downer.”

Obama wants you to believe that America is in trouble, and that it can only be cured with a big lurch to the left. Take from the rich and give to the non-rich. Redistribute income and wealth. It’s an age-old recipe for economic disaster.It completely ignores incentives for entrepreneurs, small family-owned businesses, and investors.You can’t have capitalism without capital. But Obama would penalize capital, be it capital from corporations or investors. This will only harm, and not advance, opportunities for middle-class workers.

Obama believes he can use government, and not free markets, to drive the economy. But on taxes, trade, and regulation, Obama’s program is anti-growth.A President Obama would steer us in the social-market direction of Western Europe, which has produced only stagnant economies down through the years. It would be quite an irony. While newly emerging nations inEastern Europe and Asia are lowering the tax penalties on capital -- and reaping the economic rewards -- Obama would raise them. Low-rate flat-tax plans are proliferating around the world. Yet Obama completely ignores this. American competitivenesswould suffer enormously under Obama, as would job opportunities, productivity, and real wages.

Imitate the failures of Germany, Norway, and Sweden? That’s no way to run economic policy.

I have so far been soft on Obama this election season. In many respects he is a breath of fresh air. He’s an attractive candidate with an appealing approach to politics. Obama is likeable, and sometimes he gets it -- such as when he opposed Hillary Clinton’s five-year rate-freeze on mortgages.

But his message is pessimism, not hope. And behind the charm and charisma is a big-government bureaucrat who would take us down the wrong economic road.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Unions. In Season Two of The Wire, Frank Sobotka, the head of the longshoremen's union, gives some lame speech about how his father worked on the docks, and his father's father worked on the docks, and now his son might not have a job on the docks. His point is that now, with advances in technology, many of his dwindling union membership's jobs are disappearing because robotic machines can do much of the loading and sorting, or something along those lines. And this is a bad thing? When politicians give speeches about how important it is to preserve specific types of jobs, I want to hold myself underwater until I go completely limp. Why should a longshoreman have any more job security than a waiter or a Starbuck's barista? Aren't the qualifications simply that you have a minimum amount of physical strength and the ability to follow orders? I don't get it. As has been mentioned many times on this blog, candidates like Barack Obama are the guys who would have been out there a hundred years ago giving emotional speeches about the importance of preserving the critical jobs of horse-and-buggy industry laborers, as if there's some moral obligation involved.

Check out the highlighted parts.

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Obama's Teamster "Diplomacy"

February 21, 2008; Page A16

Barack Obama has pledged to "renew American diplomacy." Except, apparently, when it might interfere with an endorsement from the Teamsters.

President James Hoffa bestowed the powerful union's blessing on Mr. Obama yesterday, not so coincidentally only days after the Senator declared his opposition to the pending U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. In a statement inserted in the Congressional Record last week, Mr. Obama said he believes the pact doesn't pay "proper attention" to America's "key industries and agricultural sectors" like cars, rice and beef. Opposition to free-trade deals is now a union litmus test, especially for the Teamsters and Service Employees International Union, which endorsed the Senator last Friday.

Try squaring Mr. Obama's views on the FTA with his criticism of the Bush Administration for not negotiating with unfriendly regimes, taken straight from an online position paper: It "makes us look arrogant, it denies us opportunities to make progress, and it makes it harder for America to rally international support for our leadership." Or consider this promise from his Asia policy paper: Mr. Obama "will maintain strong ties with allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia" and "work to build an infrastructure with countries in East Asia that can promote stability and prosperity."

Consider also that Seoul is willing to open up some of its own politically sensitive industries, such as banking and cars, for the FTA. Mr. Obama might take a look at a report last fall from the International Trade Commission, which says the FTA is expected to boostU.S. GDP by $10 billion to $12 billion annually and that the impact on American employment would be "negligible." In exchange, consumers in both countries would enjoy lower prices and a wider range of goods.

Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has put a lot of political capital behind the trade pact and President-elect Lee Myung-bak is also a strong supporter. The men, who represent opposing parties, don't agree on much but they have agreed to push the FTA through the NationalAssembly as early as this week. A U.S. "no" would be a huge embarrassment for them -- and for American "diplomacy."

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Several people emailed me a column last week, by Gary Hubbell, about a forgotten block of voters in this year's election. I have taken this column and reprinted here excerpts, partly to shorten it, but mainly to soften it when it veers off into nastiness. The remaining version here is worth reading, I think.

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Gary HubbellFebruary 9, 2008EXCERPTS:

There is a great amount of interest in this year’s presidential elections. . . .

. . . .There is one group no one has recognized, and it is the group that will decide the election. . . . He comes from all economic backgrounds, from dirt-poor to filthy rich. He represents all geographic areas in America, from urban sophisticate to rural redneck, deep South to mountain West, left Coast to Eastern Seaboard.

His common traits are that he isn’t looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field. In many cases, he is an independent businessman and employs several people. He pays more than his share of taxes and works hard.

The victimhood syndrome buzzwords — “disenfranchised,” “marginalized” and “voiceless” — don’t resonate with him. . . . He’s used to picking up the tab, whether it’s the company Christmas party, three sets of braces, three college educations or a beautiful wedding.

He believes the Constitution is to be interpreted literally, not as a “living document” open to the whims and vagaries of a panel of judges. . . .

. . . He owns firearms, and he’s willing to pick up a gun to defend his home and his country. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others. . . .

. . . Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina — he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter.

His last name and religion don’t matter. His background might be Italian, English, Polish, German, Slavic, Irish, or Russian, and he might have Cherokee, Mexican, or Puerto Rican mixed in, but he considers himself a white American.

He’s a man’s man, the kind of guy who likes to play poker, watch football, hunt white-tailed deer, call turkeys, play golf, spend a few bucks at a strip club once in a blue moon, change his own oil and build things. He coaches baseball, soccer and football teams and doesn’t ask for a penny. He’s the kind of guy who can put an addition on his house with a couple of friends, drill an oil well, weld a new bumper for his truck, design a factory and publish books. He can fill a train with 100,000 tons of coal and get it to the power plant on time so that you keep the lights on and never know what it took to flip that light switch.

Women either love him or hate him, but they know he’s a man, not a dishrag. If they’re looking for someone to walk all over, they’ve got the wrong guy. He stands up straight, opens doors for women and says “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am.”

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. . . .

He’s not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race. He’s willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Most important, he is pissed off. When his job site becomes flooded with illegal workers who don’t pay taxes and his wages drop like a stone, he gets righteously angry. . . . When Al Sharpton comes on TV, leading some rally for reparations for slavery or some such nonsense, he bites his tongue and he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement. . . .

Peggy Noonan's columns are usually a little bit too sugary and carmelized for me, but this is a great one. The smartest part is her suggestion to the people who come under the spell of the emotional rhetoric of Obama to print out transcripts of his speeches and read the content, separating the "thrills and chills" from specific policy stances.

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Try a Little Tenderness

By Peggy Noonan

February 22, 2008

Barack Obama's biggest draw is not his eloquence. When you watch an Obama speech, you lean forward and listen and think, That's good. He's compelling, I like the way he speaks. And afterward all the commentators call him "impossibly eloquent" and say "he gave me thrills and chills." But, in fact, when you go on the Internet and get a transcript of the speech and print it out and read it--that is, when you remove Mr. Obama from the words and take them on their own--you see the speech wasn't all that interesting, and was in fact high-class boilerplate. (This was not true of John F. Kennedy's speeches, for instance, which could be read seriously as part of the literature of modern American politics, or Martin Luther King's work, which was powerful absent his voice.)

Mr. Obama is magnetic, interacts with the audience, leads a refrain: "Yes, we can." It's good, and compared with Hillary Clinton and John McCain, neither of whom seems really to enjoy giving speeches, it comes across as better than it is. But is it eloquence? No. Eloquence is deep thought expressed in clear words. With Mr. Obama the deep thought part is missing. What is present are sentiments.

Our country can be greater, it holds unachieved promise, our leaders have not led us well. "We struggle with our doubts, our fears, our cynicism." Fair enough and true enough, but he doesn't dig down to explain how to become a greater nation, what specific path to take--more power to the state, for instance, or more power to the individual. He doesn't unpack his thoughts, as they say. He asserts and keeps on walking.

So his draw is not literal eloquence but a reputation for eloquence that may, in time, become the real thing.

But his big draw is this. In a country that has throughout most of our lifetimes been tormented by, buffeted by, the question of race, a country that has endured real pain and paid in blood and treasure to work its way through and out of the mess, that for all that struggle we yielded this: a brilliant and accomplished young black man with a consensus temperament, a thoughtful and peaceful person who wishes to lead. That is his draw: "We made that." "It ended well."

People would love to be able to support that guy.

His job, in a way, is to let them, in part by not being just another operative, plaything or grievance-monger of the left-liberal establishment and left-liberal thinking. By standing, in fact, for real change.

Right now Mr. Obama is in an awkward moment. Each day he tries to nail down his party's leftist base, and take it from Mrs. Clinton. At the same time his victories have led the country as a whole to start seeing him as the probable Democratic nominee. They're looking at him in a new way, and wondering: Is he standard, old time and party line, or is he something new? Is he just a turning of the page, or is he the beginning of a new and helpful chapter?

Mr. Obama did not really have a good week, in spite of winning a primary and a caucus, and both resoundingly. I don't refer to charges that he'd plagiarized words from a Deval Patrick speech. He borrowed an argument that was in itself obvious--words matter--and used words in the public sphere. In any case Mrs. Clinton has lifted so many phrases and approaches from Mr. Obama, and other candidates, that her accusation was like the neighborhood kleptomaniac running through the street crying, "Thief! Thief!"

His problem was, is, his wife's words, not his, the speech in which she said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country, because Obama is winning. She later repeated it, then tried to explain it, saying of course she loves her country. But damage was done. Why? Because her statement focused attention on what I suspect are some basic and elementary questions that were starting to bubble out there anyway.

* * *

Here are a few of them.

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you're losing America, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry withPresident Barack, will that mean America is bad?

* * *

Michelle Obama seems keenly aware of her struggles, of what it took to rise so high as a black woman in a white country. Fair enough. But I have wondered if it is hard for young African-Americans of her generation, havingbeen drilled in America's sad racial history, having been told about it every day of their lives, to fully apprehend the struggles of others. I wonder if she knows that some people look at her and think "Man, she got it all." Intelligent, strong, tall,beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for its sins and be helpful, and from a working-class family with two functioning parents who made sure she got to school.

That's the great divide in modern America, whether or not you had a functioning family, and she apparently came from the privileged part of that divide. A lot of white working-class Americans didn't come up with those things. Some of them were raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country anyway, every day.

Does Mrs. Obama know this? I don't know. If she does, love and gratitude for the place that tries to give everyone an equal shot would seem to be in order.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

In 1963, John F. Kennedy was murdered in Texas by a fervent admirer of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In 2008, a large Cuban flag emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara, Castro's brutal henchman, is prominently displayed in a Barack Obama campaign volunteer office in Houston.

Obama has been widely compared to JFK, most notably by the late president's brother and daughter. President Kennedy, a stalwart anticommunist, despised Castro and his gang of totalitarian thugs. But when word broke last week that Obama's supporters in Houston work under a banner glorifying Che, the campaign's reaction was to brush it off as an issue involving only volunteers, not the official campaign. After two days of controversy, the campaign issued a statement calling the flag "inappropriate" and saying its display "does not reflect Senator Obama's views." Would JFK have reacted so mildly?

In December 1962, Kennedy offered a blunt summary of the Castro/Che record to that date. "The Cuban people were promised by the revolution political liberty, social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the campesinos, and an end to economic exploitation," he said. "They have received a police state, the elimination of the dignity of land ownership, the destruction of free speech and a free press, and the complete subjugation of individual human welfare." Eleven months later, in a speech intended for delivery on the day he was assassinated, Kennedy regretted that Castro's "Communist foothold" in Latin America had "not yet been eliminated."

Were he alive today, it's hard to imagine JFK feeling anything but contempt for those who extol a dictatorship that has been crushing freedom and human beings for nearly 50 years. And it would surely pain him that so many of the cheerleaders are members of his own political party.

The lionizing of Che, a sociopath who relished killing and acclaimed "the pedagogy of the firing squad," is not just "inappropriate." It is vile.No American in his right mind would be caught dead wearing a David Duke T-shirt or displaying a poster of Pol Pot.A celebrity who was spotted with a swastika-festooned cap or an actress who revealed that she had gotten a tattoo depicting Timothy McVeigh would inspire only repugnance. No presidential campaign would need more than 30 seconds to sever its ties to anyone, paid staffer or volunteer, whose office was adorned with a Ku Klux Klan banner.Yet Che's likeness, which ought to be as loathed as any of those, is instead a trendy bestseller and a cult favorite.

A few years ago the New York Public Library gift shop sold Che wristwatches. These it described as "featuring the classic romantic image of Che Guevara, around which the word 'revolution' revolves." But Che's idea of revolution was anything but romantic. What he cherished was hatred and murder: "Hatred as an element of struggle," he wrote in 1967, "unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine." It was a sentiment he expressed repeatedly — and lived up to.

With Che at his side, Castro toppled Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. "As soon as they had seized power," notes *The Black Book of Communism*, a magisterial survey of communist terror and repression in the 20th century, "they began to conduct mass executions inside the two main prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara." As chief prosecutor of the new regime, Che oversaw the bloodbath, ordering hundreds of executions in the first months of 1959. Those he killed, *The Black Book* records, included "former comrades-in-arms who refused to abandon their democratic beliefs."

Like totalitarians of every stripe, Che didn't scruple at the death of innocents. "Quit the dallying!" he ordered Jose Vilasuso, a conscientious government lawyer who was seeking evidence against several prisoners. "Your job is a very simple one. Judicial evidence is an archaic and secondary bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! We execute from revolutionary conviction."

Time magazine once called Che the "brain" of the Cuban Revolution, and saluted his "icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and . . . perceptive sense of humor." A better description comes from journalist Humberto Fontova, who observes in *Exposing The Real Che Guevara* that Che was for Castro what Heinrich Himmler was for Hitler and Lavrenty Beria for Stalin — "the snarling enforcer." Fittingly, a massive drawing of Che adorns the headquarters of Cuba's secret police in Havana.

That this sadistic thug's face also adorns the office of a US presidential candidate's supporters is appalling and disgraceful. That the candidate couldn't bring himself to say so is even worse.

1. Sen. Clinton, you oppose the Bush tax cuts because they unfairly benefit the rich. Since the top 1 percent of taxpayers — those making more than $364,000 annually — pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes, don't all across-the-board tax cuts, by definition, "unfairly" benefit the rich?

2. Sen. Obama, you also oppose Bush tax cuts, and claim that they take money away from the Treasury. But President Kennedy signed across-the-board tax cuts in the 1960s and said, "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low — and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now." Was he wrong?

3. Sen. Clinton, you criticize President Bush for inheriting a surplus and turning it into a deficit. The National Taxpayers Union added up your campaign promises, and they came to an increase of over $218 billion per year. What would this do to thedeficit?

4. Sen. Obama, if elected, you promised to raise minimum wage every single year. But isn't it true that most economists — 90 percent, according to one survey — believe that raising minimum wages increases unemployment and decreases job opportunities for the most unskilled workers? What makes you right, and the majority of economists wrong?

5. Sen. Clinton, you want universal health care coverage for all Americans — every man, woman and child. When, as First Lady, you tried to do this, 560 economists wrote President Clinton, and said, "Price controls produce shortages, black markets and reduced quality." One economist who helped gather the signatures explained, "Price controls don't control the true costs of goods. People pay in other ways." Are those 560 economists wrong?

6. Sen. Obama, you once said you understand why senators voted for the Iraq war, admitted that you were "not privy to Senate intelligence reports," that it "was a tough question and a tough call" for the senators, and that you "didn't know" how you would have voted had you been in the Senate. And over a year after the war began, you said, "There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage." How, then, can you say that you consistently opposed the war from the start?

7. Sen. Clinton, you want to begin withdrawing the troops within the first 60 days of your administration, with all the troops out within a year. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker of the Baker-Hamilton report said that such a precipitous withdrawal in Iraq would create a staging ground for al-Qaida, increase the influence of Iran over Iraq, and result in "the biggest civil war you've ever seen." What would you like to say to Secretary Baker?

8. Sen. Obama, the church you attend, according to its Web site, pursues an Afrocentric agenda. Your church rejects, as part of their "Black Value System," "middleclassness" as "classic methodology" of white "captors" to "control … subjugated" black "captives." Your pastor, Jeremiah Wright, recently called the Nation of Islam's Minister Louis Farrakhan — a man many consider anti-Semitic — a person of "integrity and honesty." What would happen to a Republican candidate who attended a Caucasian-centric church, and who praised David Duke as a man of "integrity and honesty"?

9. Sen. Clinton, you recently criticized NAFTA, the free trade agreement signed into law by President Clinton. The conservative Heritage Foundation says that NAFTA-like free trade benefits the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, resulting in increased trade, higher U.S. exports and improved living standards for American workers. Explain how President Clinton and the Heritage Foundation got it wrong then, but that you are right now.

10. Sen. Obama, this question is about global warming, something about which you urge extreme action to fight. You criticize President Bush for going to war in Iraq, even though all 16 intelligence agencies felt with "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs. Critics of Bush say he "cherry-picked" the intelligence. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists consider concerns about global warming overblown. Isn't there far more dissent among credible scientists about global warning than there was among American intelligence analysts about Iraq? If so, as to the studies on global warming, why can't you be accused of cherry-picking?

Sunday, February 10, 2008

A female Friend of the Grotto found a great pamphlet on Capitalism in her grandmother's old belongings and mailed it to me. It's amazing to look at this dusty little tract that was designed to slug it out for the hearts and minds of people in 1959! The difference between this Capitalist propaganda and the competing Socialist or Communist propaganda is that the former is true and the latter is false.

Here's an excerpt, telling a little story to explain why Capitalism works and is the best system we've been able to come up with:

What the hell is he talking about? "Face up to the fact” that some British citizens don't "relate to the British legal system?" Are you kidding me? My guess is that most lawbreakers don't particularly "relate to" whatever legal system happens to be prosecuting them. “An approach to law which simply said there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said . . . I think that’s a bit of a danger.” Come again? I am considering hitting "Save" on this post and then immediately rigging up a contraption to drop an eight hundred pound safe on my own head.

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From The Sunday Times

February 10, 2008

By Minette Marrin

Archbishop, You’ve Committed Treason

My text for today is “Hold fast that which is good”: 1 Thessalonians 5:21. These are words I heard so regularly in prayers at my Anglican girls’ school that I have been unable to forget them. I draw them to the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to have forgotten them. At least, he seems to be losing his grip on what is good in this country and, indeed, to be throwing it away with both hands in his curious suggestion that aspects of sharia should be recognised in English law.

In an interview on Radio 4 last Thursday, Rowan Williams said that the introduction of parts of Islamic law here would help to maintain social cohesion and seems unavoidable. Sharia courts exist already, he pointed out. We should “face up to the fact” that some British citizens do not relate to the British legal system, he said, and that Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

What he went on to say was more astonishing. He explained to the interviewer, in his gentle, wordy way, that a lot of what is written on this confusing subject suggests “the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody”. He went on: “That principle is an important pillar of our social identity as a western liberal democracy.” How true.

However, he continued: “It’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society, and the law needs to take some account of that.”

Stuff like this is bad for the blood pressure, but I listened on. “An approach to law which simply said there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said . . . I think that’s a bit of a danger.”

What danger? And to whom? The danger, surely, is rather the archbishop and those who think like him, who seem unwilling to hold fast that which is good. What is good and best and essential about our society – it isn’t merely a matter of “social identity” – is the principle of equality before the law. That principle and its practice have made this country the outstandingly just and tolerant state it is; it is one of the last remaining forces for unity as well.

What is also good and essential to this country is the law itself. It has evolved over centuries from medieval barbarities into something, for all its faults, that is civilised. Our law expresses and maintains the best virtues of our society. Anybody who does not accept it does not belong here.

When other legal systems or other customs clash with ours, we prefer ours, to put it mildly. At least we should; what has troubled me for years is the way that exceptions and excuses tend to be made, in the name of multiculturalism, for practices of which we do not approve. Victoria Climbié’s terrible bruises were ignored because of assumptions about the cultural norms of African discipline. Last week it emerged that someone in government has sold the moral pass on polygamy: husbands with multiple wives in this country are now to get benefit payments for each wife.

In the midst of all this moral confusion and relativism, is the premier prelate in the land holding fast that which is good? Far from it. He is recommending multiculti legal cherry-picking, in which individuals would be free to choose the jurisdiction they preferred for certain matters. He even admits that his proposal introduces, “uncomfortably”, the idea of a market in the law, “a competition for loyalty”.

One encouraging sign is the almost universal fury that our foolish archbishop has aroused: he has miraculously united the irreconcilable in opposition to himself, from Christian extremists to mainstream Muslims, from Anglican vicars to godless Hampstead liberals, from Gordon Brown to backwoods Tories.

The archbishop and his few supporters insist that the media have misrepresented him and not many people have actually read the learned speech that he gave to a learned audience after his inflammatory radio interview. They are wrong. I haven’t seen any serious misrepresentation in the media, and reading his speech several times doesn’t exonerate him. Nor does it increase respect for his judgment, his command of English or his powers of ratiocination; he is woolly of face and woolly of mind.

In any case, you do not need to follow anybody’s argument to understand that legally recognising aspects of sharia is either unnecessary or undesirable. If the aspects in question accord with English law (the Anglican archbishop is speaking of England, presumably), there is no need to offer any extra provision or recognition for religious courts. They are of no interest to the law. If they don’t accord with English law, they are unacceptable and should be repudiated, or even prosecuted.

All this has nothing particularly to do with it being Islamic law at issue. The same would apply to any other religious law: Hindu, Mormon or wiccan. However, there is a lot to be said against sharia and the desire of a reported 40% of British Muslims to live under it. That explains, in part, the present outrage. Sharia is rightly feared here: it is disputed, sometimes primitive, grievously in need of reform and wholly unacceptable in Britain.

So what possessed this troublesome priest to stir up this predictable fury with his divisive and unnecessary suggestions? Why did he choose to speak not just in a quiet academic meeting but also in the public glare of The World at One? And cui bono? It has most certainly not been good for ordinary British Muslims, as they well understand. It has, however, given comfort to Muslim extremists, who will see this as the thin end of their Islamist wedge.

Williams’s behaviour looks like vainglorious attention-seeking, but it is also something much worse. To seek to undermine our legal system and the values on which it rests, in a spirit of unnecessary appeasement to an alien set of values, is a kind of treason. It is a betrayal of all those who struggled and died here, over the centuries, for freedom and equality under the rule of law and of their courage in the face of injustice and unreason. Theirs is the good that we should hold fast and so of all people should the Archbishop of Canterbury. Otherwise, what is he for?

. . . Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others. One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are "taught to hate." This is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why. And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their kids.

As a conservative, I'm a big believer in the importance of tradition, which writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed "democracy of the dead." But tradition can only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so, when I read that 23 percent of British teens think Winston Churchill is no more real than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society, the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.

Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity.

I seem to remember this being a sizzling, central issue in the debate over the war:

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REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Buried WMD Scoop

February 1st, 2008

Journalists are taught never to "bury the lead." Yet it looks as if that's precisely what CBS's "60 Minutes" did in reporter Scott Pelley's fascinating interview Sunday with George Piro, the FBI agent who debriefed Saddam Hussein following his capture in December 2003.

The Lebanese-born Mr. Piro, one of only a handful of agents at the bureau who speaks Arabic, was able to wheedle information from Saddam over a matter of months through a combination of flattery and ego-deflation that worked wonders with the former despot. But as Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute first noticed, the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.

Here's the relevant segment, which appears well down in the interview:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Iraq's active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn't exactly news. The key point is Saddam's admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.

Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being "contained" by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, "sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq]."

Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called "No-Fly Zones." And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.

In another telling moment in the "60 Minutes" interview, Mr. Piro relates that when he asked Saddam about his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, the dictator acknowledged that he had given the orders personally and explained himself in a word: "Necessary." The same still goes for getting rid of Saddam.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

. . . There is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to do.

Economists can give you all sorts of scenarios in which government intervention could make things better, whether when fighting off a recession, regulating domestic markets or controlling international trade.

Some people even believe that whenever there is "market failure," the government ought to step in.

Of course markets can fail. Everything human can fail. But if Alex Rodriguez strikes out, do the Yankees take him out of the game and send in a pinch hitter for him?

No one would dream of suggesting such a thing. We are far more rational when discussing sports than when discussing politics.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

As you've noticed, most columns having to do with John McCain these days are either by angry conservatives accusing him of being more of a liberal than Leon Trotsky, or by moderates trying to "sell" him to the conservative base. I came across the following column, which I found to be very unemotional and objective. It should be help you sort through all the "white noise."

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February 01, 2008

Is John McCain a Conservative?

ByRobert Robb

One of the larger questions overhanging the race for the Republican presidential nomination is this: Is John McCain a conservative? That question is best answered by borrowing a distinction Bill Buckley has made about both President Bushs. According to Buckley, they are "conservative," but not "a conservative."

By that, Buckley meant that they would usually list toward the conservative position, but weren't anchored by the philosophical tenets of modern American conservatism he did so much to expound and popularize. To answer the question of how much McCain can be expected to list conservative requires, regrettably, also borrowing from Bill Clinton: It depends on what the definition of "conservatism" is.

Channeling Teddy Roosevelt

McCain is most clearly not "a conservative" on the issue of the appropriate role of the federal government. Here, McCain has taken after Teddy Roosevelt, one of his political heroes. Roosevelt viewed the federal government as the ultimate arbiter in the political economy with a particular role in being a counterweight to accumulations of wealth or power. He didn't much see a need for the authority of the federal government itself to be constrained.

In his 2000 presidential campaign, McCain frequently inveighed against the power of special interests and touted himself as the guy who would get reforms done by counterbalancing their power. McCain-Feingold, of course, was intended directly to reduce the political influence of wealth.

As a legislator, McCain has also not seen natural limits on federal authority. For example, he sees nothing untoward about the federal government telling cable TV companies how they have to bundle and sell their channels. In 2008, this has not been as prominent a feature of McCain's repertoire. However, it's clearly still a part of his political persona and occasionally rises to the surface, such as his recent moral condemnation of big pharmaceutical companies.

Taxes

Prominent conservatives are still criticizing McCain for his votes against the Bush tax cuts. McCain defends himself by saying he voted against them because they weren't offset with reductions in spending. But that's only part of the story.

McCain also sponsored, along with Democratic leader Tom Daschle, an amendment to eviscerate the already modest reduction Bush proposed for the top individual tax rate. This was accompanied by rhetoric criticizing tax cuts for the wealthy.

Conservatives used to be divided between budget balancers and tax-cutters. That argument was pretty well settled by the Reagan tax cuts, which both bolstered the economy and produced more revenue for the federal government. The same can be said for the Bush tax cuts.

Deficits do matter and conservatives would like to see a tighter rein on federal spending and entitlement reform. However, there is now a clear conservative consensus that priority should be given to tax changes that eliminate disincentives for productive economic activity. McCain says he would make the Bush tax cuts permanent. But it's far from clear that he has been persuaded that growth-oriented tax policy should take precedence. His instinct is still to be Concord Coalition Man, not a supply-sider.

Spending and Trade

McCain has been a valuable public scold on federal spending in general and pork projects in particular. In fact, the best conservative case that can be made for McCain on domestic policy is that he can most be trusted to expend the political capital needed to break the back of the Washington spending culture.

McCain is also a staunch free-trader. He has a record of standing his ground even when the prevailing political winds turn against him, as they are doing on free trade.

Entitlement Reform

McCain's commitment to Social Security and Medicare reform to correct the fiscal imbalance resulting from the decline in the ratio of workers to retirees is also rock solid. However, his commitment to conservative reforms of the programs is less certain. He's been a steady supporter of personal retirement accounts as part of Social Security. However, he says that Social Security reform needs to be done through a bipartisan commission. All that can possibly result from that is the kind of patchwork that emerged from Reagan's similar commission: a bit of tax-hiking here, a benefit trim there.

On Medicare, McCain's track record is more disturbing. He sensibly voted against the Medicare prescription drug benefit as an unfunded entitlement expansion. However, the principal Medicare reform he has thumped for is allowing the federal government to directly negotiate drug prices, rather than the current policy of allowing providers to compete in part on the basis of price. This is his Rooseveltian distrust of markets showing through again.

Immigration

McCain's support for providing legal status for those currently in the country illegally has clearly hurt him dearly with Republican activists. It is, however, less clear the extent to which this amounts to a conservative apostasy. The dominant voice belongs to the populist conservatives who believe that the principle of the rule of law is at stake, and there is considerable merit in that contention. However, some economic conservatives, while not as consequential in this debate, see it more as a matter of wrong-headed government interference with the laws of supply and demand in the labor market.

Although it is not discussed much in public, many conservatives also see the large volume of Mexican immigration the country has been experiencing as a threat to the dominant Anglo-Protestant American culture, as described with bracing candor in Samuel Huntington's book, "Who Are We?" That explains the emotional whirlwind McCain's immigration position has stirred up. Still, immigration is, at best, a cloudy lens through which to judge his conservatism.

Gang of 14

I defended McCain's brokering of a deal on judges at the time it was made.Some conservative pundits express breezy confidence that if a showdown occurred, the ability to filibuster judges would have been jettisoned. Those counting the votes at the time didn't share that confidence. To me, the Gang of 14 agreement mostly represented a declaration of independence by the participating Democratic senators from the effective veto left-wing groups had on judges by triggering solid Democratic support for filibusters. What is known is that after the Gang of 14 agreement Roberts and Alito made it to the Supreme Court. What would have occurred without it is thinly-based speculation.

Muscular Realpolitik

McCain was advocating rogue-state rollback back when George W. Bush was promising a more humble foreign policy and well before the axis of evil. Bush ended up, in his post-9/11 reconfiguration, adopting a sort of conservative Wilsonianism, in rhetoric if not so much in actual policy after elections brought Hamas to power in the Palestinian Authority. McCain's foreign policy is likely to be just as assertive, but without so much of the Wilsonian gossamer.

Whether this is truly a conservative approach should be subject to more debate. The conservative foreign policy instinct used to be to leave other countries alone, except to try to sell them stuff. This was set aside to deal with the expansionist threat of Soviet communism. The overwhelming conservative consensus is that the threat of Islamic terrorism also requires an active engagement in the affairs of other countries. In my judgment, too little attention is being paid by conservatives to the strategic implications of the differences between the two threats, but I'm in an extremely small and uninfluential minority.

If you want an assertive foreign policy, and most conservatives decidedly do, then you can't do better than McCain. He's the only Republican in the race with a real track record on the issue.

Global Warming

The conservative lions are global warming skeptics and cite McCain's cap-and-trade proposal as an incidence of ideological apostasy. However, it is not part of conservative doctrine that those who cause environmental damage shouldn't have to pay for it. Cap-and-trade does leverage markets and is generally regarded by conservatives as superior to command-and-control environmental regulation.

There is a better approach. The scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, hardly a Greenpeace front group, have developed a proposal for a carbon tax, with the proceeds used to bid down other taxes. That way, greenhouse gases are reduced while the tax code becomes more growth-oriented overall. However, if this is a problem meriting government attention, cap-and-trade is within the ambit of conservative approaches. Although liberals and conservatives tend to divide on it, whether the problem merits government attention isn't a question answerable by reference to conservative philosophical principles.

Social Issues

McCain's voting record should make him acceptable to social conservatives. However, they don't trust him, in large measure because of the speech he gave after losing South Carolina in 2008. While the speech ostensibly dressed down specific social conservative leaders, the rank-and-file widely perceived it as ripping the influence of social conservatives generally. It was one of the dumber political moves of our time.

In an attempt to discredit McCain on policy rather than trust grounds, some social conservatives are citing his vote against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. McCain's position has been that he opposes gay marriage but believes it is an issue to be decided by the states. Consistent with that, he voted against the federal constitutional ban because it pre-empted the states, but supported a ballot measure banning gay marriage and even civil unions in Arizona. Social conservatives may not like that. But it's consistent with the principle of subsidiarity - no higher level of government should do what a lower level can do - that was a key tenet of the modern American conservatism founded by Buckley.

Compared to Whom?

Despite their fervent wishes, conservatives cannot exhume Ronald Reagan and put him on the 2008 ballot. So, the actionable question is which of the candidates is the most conservative. In this regard, it is surely relevant that McCain has always thought of himself as a conservative and proclaimed himself to be such. There is reason to believe that he has not always acted as one and overall hasn't earned Buckley's article as "a conservative." Conservatism, however, is the team he has always seen himself as being on. That's obviously not true of Mitt Romney, whom many conservative pundits are trying to advance as the best overall conservative in the race. In his 1994 race against Ted Kennedy, Romney famously said: "I was independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

While the comment has made the rounds, I'm not sure conservatives have fully pondered its significance. This disassociation from Reagan didn't occur in 1979, when it was unknown what kind of a president he would be. It occurred six years after he had left office, when his record was fully established, including the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor was Romney a young buck, just feeling his way around politics. He was in his late 40s and, as a substantial business leader, undoubtedly followed public affairs closely.

Before being crowned the conservative candidate, surely Romney should be required to answer more fully and candidly exactly what he found so repugnant about Reagan that he wasn't even willing to be in the same political party as the Gipper.

This isn't to argue that McCain should be the conservative candidate and Romney or shouldn't. Or Huckabee or Paul for that matter. Conservatives are divided because the choice isn't clear. In making that choice, however, this much should be acknowledged about McCain: He's always considered himself to be a conservative. And where he is clearly conservative - on spending, trade and foreign policy - voters can have a considerable measure of confidence that he will remain so.

Robert Robb is a columnist for the Arizona Republic and a RealClearPolitics contributor.

Monday, February 04, 2008

A group of Americans, retired teachers, recently went to France on a tour. Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane.

At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on: "You have been to France before, monsieur?" the customs officer asked sarcastically.

Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously. "Then you should know enough to have your passport ready."

The American said, "The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it."

"Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France!"

The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained: "Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn't find any Goddamn Frenchmen to show it to!"

The year is 2008, and the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women has issued a press release calling Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama over Hillary "the ultimate betrayal."

Does this N.O.W. exec think she is advancing the standing of women in society by asking them to make themselves look like complete idiots? I thought the point of the civil rights movement was to make color and gender matter LESS, not MORE.

Something makes me think that, in a hypothetical general election, if Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama over another woman, say Condoleeza Rice for instance, N.O.W. wouldn't be calling that "the ultimate betrayal."

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |When you're trying to fashion yourself as an agent of change, it isn't helpful when the sisters of politics past abandon their golf club picket lines in girly protest of mean men who support male candidates.

Reacting recently to Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama, the president of the New York state chapter of the National Organization for Women issued a press release insisting that Kennedy had committed "the ultimate betrayal" of women by supporting Obama.

In the world of identity politics, one woman's bad date is Every Woman's call to victimhood.

Kennedy's history with women needs no rehashing, though it's worth noting that feminists have a convenient way of measuring betrayal when it comes to politics. Womanizing — and in Kennedy's case, what might be negligent homicide by today's standards in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne — is given a pass as long as the ol'boys do what the girls tell them come vote time.

Fail that latter qualification, and watch out.

In the minds of women with nothing left to protest, true betrayal is supporting a man when a woman is running. How dare he. It's all rather ... frock-ish. Perhaps precious? In 21st-century America, feminist outrage has morphed into feminine pique.

In the press release, which featured the sort of exclamatory punctuation one usually associates with a too-tight bodice, NOW-NYS President Marcia Pappas wrote that Kennedy's endorsement of Hillary Clinton's opponent "really hit women hard."

Pappas pointed out that women have forgiven Kennedy for all manner of offenses, even "hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act," and "buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. ...

"And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He's picked the new guy over us."

Such debutante breathlessness isn't likely to advance the notion that men and women are equal to any and all tasks. They may be equal to the requirements of the presidency in fact, but theories of women's emotional embrace of victimhood are only aided and abetted by such mewling outbursts.

According to NOW-NYS' interpretation, Kennedy has joined other "progressive white men" who can't handle the prospect of a female president.

Trying to leaven the NOW-NYS remarks, the president of NOW-New York City, Sonia Ossorio, countered with a more respectful take on Kennedy's endorsement, recognizing that people "share differences of opinions." Then, national president Kim Gandy went another step, recognizing Kennedy's work for women's civil and reproductive rights.

When feminists quarrel, is it still a catfight?

Pappas may have accurately expressed what other feminists feel. They've snuggled up to Kennedy and other men, including Bill Clinton, whose behavior toward women wouldn't be tolerated were it not for their usefulness in pushing through legislation demanded by women.

Now that a woman aims for the highest office — in fact, the woman whose husband betrayed her and countless others — they feel they have a right to expect more for their investment in iniquity.

With so many women scorned, Hell will need an annex.

But such thinking reveals an ugly truth about feminists and identity groups in general. They don't want what's best for the country; they want what's best for them. NOW wants a woman not because she's the best candidate, but because, by damn, it's their turn.

Hillary, too, might have expected more from her old Democratic chums, but she's a pro and a woman accustomed to emotional and political compromise. Thus, at Monday's State of the Union address, she did the mature thing and extended her hand to Kennedy and apparently to Obama, who was standing next to the Massachusetts senator.

A widely circulated photograph shows Obama turning away, sparking debate about whether he was snubbing Clinton. Obama has said he was merely turning to speak to someone else, and Clinton has left it to others to interpret. While Kennedy gets blasted — and Obama is characterized as snubbing the former first lady — Clinton assumes her very best role: Victim Above the Fray.

She knows the high road will take her further, as it has before. But should she win, the boys who forgot their manners had best start practicing their curtsey.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., British, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of officers that included personnel from most of those countries.

Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks, but a French admiral suddenly complained that, "whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English." He then asked: "Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French? "

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied: "Maybe it's because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to speak German."

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Hillary Clinton has been telling America that she is the most qualified candidate for president based on her "record," which she says includes her eight years in the White House as First Lady - or "co-president" - and her seven years in the Senate.

Here is a reminder of what that record includes:

* As First Lady, Hillary assumed authority over Health Care Reform, a process that cost the taxpayers over $13 million. She told both Bill Bradley and Pat Moynahan, key votes needed to pass her legislation, that she would "demonize" anyone who opposed it. But it was opposed; she couldn't even get it to a vote in a Congress controlled by her own party. (And in the next election, her party lost control of both the House and Senate.)

* Hillary assumed authority over selecting a female Attorney General. Her first two recommendations (Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood) were forced to withdraw their names from consideration, and then she chose Janet Reno. Janet Reno has since been described by Bill himself as "my worst mistake."

* Hillary recommended Lani Guanier for head of the Civil Rights Commission. When Guanier's radical views became known, her name had to be withdrawn.

* Hillary recommended her former law partners, Web Hubbell, Vince Foster, and William Kennedy for positions in the Justice Department, White House staff, and the Treasury, respectively. Hubbell was later imprisoned, Foster allegedly committed suicide, and Kennedy was forced to resign.

* Hillary also recommended a close friend of the Clintons, Craig Livingstone, for the position of director of White House security. When Livingstone was investigated for the improper access of up to 900 FBI files of Clinton enemies (Filegate) and the widespread use of drugs by White House staff, both Hillary and her husband denied knowing him. (FBI agent Dennis Sculimbrene confirmed in a Senate Judiciary Committee in 1996 both the drug use and Hillary' involvement in hiring Livingstone.)

After that, the FBI closed its White House Liaison Office, after serving seven presidents for over thirty years.

* In order to open "slots" in the White House for her friends the Harry Thomasons (to whom millions of dollars in travel contracts could be awarded), Hillary had the entire staff of the White House Travel Office fired; they were reported to the FBI for "gross mismanagement" and their reputations ruined. After a thirty-month investigation, only one, Billy Dale, was charged with a crime - mixing personal money with White House funds when he cashed checks. The jury acquitted him in less than two hours.

* Another of Hillary's assumed duties was directing the "bimbo eruption squad" and scandal defense:

---- She urged her husband not to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit.

---- She refused to release the Whitewater documents, which led to the appointment of Ken Starr as Special Prosecutor. After $80 million dollars of taxpayer money was spent, Starr's investigation led to Monica Lewinsky, which led to Bill lying about and later admitting his affairs.

---- Then they had to settle with Paula Jones after all for $800,000.

---- And Bill lost his law license for lying to the grand jury

---- And Bill was impeached by the House.

---- And Hillary almost got herself indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice (she avoided it mostly because she repe ated, "I do not recall," "I have no recollection," and "I don't know" 56 times under oath).

* Hillary accepted the traditional First Lady's role of decorator of the White House at Christmas, but in a unique Hillary way. In 1994, for example, the First Lady's Tree in the Blue Room (the focal point each year) was decorated with drug paraphernalia, sex toys, and pornographic ornaments, all personally approved by Hillary as the invited artists' depictions of the theme, "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

* Hillary decided to seek election to the Senate in a state she had never lived in. Her husband pardoned FALN terrorists in order to get Latino support and the New Square Hassidim to get Jewish support. Hillary also had Bill pardon her brother's clients, for a small fee, to get financial support.

* Then Hillary left the White House, but later had to return $200,000 in White House furniture, china, and artwork she had stolen.

* In the campaign for the Senate, Hillary played the "Gender card" by portraying her opponent (Lazio) as a bully picking on her.

* Hillary's husband further protected her by asking the National Archives to withhold from the public until 2012 many records of their time in the White House, including much of Hillary's correspondence and her calendars. (There are ongoing lawsuits to force the release of those records.)

* As the junior Senator from New York, Hillary has passed no major legislation. she has deferred to the senior Senator (Schumer) to tend to the needs of New Yorkers, even on the hot issue of medical problems of workers involved in the cleanup of Ground Zero after 9/11.

* Hillary's one notable vote, supporting the plan to invade Iraq, she has since disavowed.

Capitalism Doesn't Work, Mr. Gates?

ByLawrence Kudlow

Bill Gates, bloviating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is issuing a clarion call for a "kinder capitalism" to aid the world's poor. Gates says he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it's failing much of the world. This, of course, from a guy who's worth around $35 billion (give or take a billion).

Don't you just love it?

A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn't work. What chutzpah.

For all his do-good preaching, Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class over the last decade. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe. (Maybeeven think France under Nicolas Sarkozy.) Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.

The latest stats out of China are revealing. Here's a country that was a basket case not so long ago and today is the world's fourth largest economy -- hot on the heels of Germany, the third largest economy. China just reported 11.2 percent fourth-quarter GDP, its fastest growth rate in 13 years. Total output for China is now 24.7 trillion yuan, or $3.42 trillion at current exchange rates.

At $14 trillion, the U.S. economy is still four times the size of China's. But we've had free-market capitalism for more than 300 years. China's only had it for about 15. China is still an undemocratic, authoritarian and repressive society that lacks the benefits of political freedom. But it was the late Milton Friedman who argued that the onset of free-market capitalism was the precursor to full-fledged democratic capitalism. China'son the right track.

Gates says he has witnessed steep income and cultural inequities in his travels around the world, in particular to Africa. But for this he should blame the absence of capitalist principles, not capitalism itself. Even the most compassionate corporate executives are not going to bring prosperity to impoverished countries with statist economies. Until Africa's nations undertake the market-oriented reforms that have boosted China and the other Asian Tigers -- like South Korea and Taiwan -- they will continue to rank at the bottom of the world prosperity scale.

The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire, while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it's no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily, while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro's failed economic model, he's sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty.

Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn't a bad thing at all. It doesn't mean that America is heading downward. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up.

The reality here is that the rising tide of global capitalism is lifting all boats that employ it. Capitalism works. It's a good thing. It's the key to unlocking a nation's prosperity. In fact, free-market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by man.

Another billionaire, George Soros, the Davos partygoer who finances near every left-wing political-action group on both sides of the Atlantic pond, recently wrote in the Financial Times that the era of capitalism is coming to an end. Soros, of course, has been predicting this for at least 20 years -- through the greatest world boom in history. And how was it that Soros made his money? Trading currencies in the technologically advanced world financial markets, the very same markets that were spawned by 20th century free-market capitalism.

So I just have to smile when billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when their buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors.

Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed, it was a miserable failure.

Lawrence Kudlow is a former Reagan economic advisor, a syndicated columnist, and the host of CNBC's Kudlow & Company.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Here's an excerpt from Mark Steyn's new column. He talks about the surreal new policy of the British Government that renames Islamic Terrorism as "Anti-Islamic Activity." While they're at it, why not call bald people "People With Thick Heads of Hair" or "People Who Are Not Bald?"

Her Majesty's government is not alone in feeling it's not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have now decided that kind of mealy-mouthed "respect" is no longer sufficient.

So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated "anti-Islamic activity." Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. "There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief," she told her audience. "Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic."

Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be "anti-Islamic" — in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction onLondoners during the Blitz was an "anti-German activity."

But I don't recall even Neville Chamberlain explaining, as if to a 5-year-old, that there is nothing German about the wish to terrorize and invade, and that this is entirely at odds with the core German values of sitting around eating huge sausages in beer gardens while wearing lederhosen. . . .

My Thanksgiving column about how the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming but thrived once they switched to private cultivation made some people angry. One commented, "Sharing of the fruits of our labor is a bad thing?"

I never said that.

I practice charity regularly. I believe in sharing. But when government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that's not sharing.

And sharing can't be a basis for production — you can't share what hasn't been produced. My point is that production and prosperity require property rights. Property rights associate effort with benefits. Where benefits are unrelated to effort, people do the least amount necessary to get by while taking the most they can get. Economists have a pithy way of summing up this truth: No one washes a rental car.

It's called the "tragedy of the commons." The idea is as old as ancient Greece, but ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the phrase in a 1968 Science magazine article. Hardin described a common pasture on which anyone may graze his livestock. Each person will benefit from a larger herd but will suffer only a tiny fraction of the negative effects of overgrazing. Public Choice economists call this "concentrated benefits and dispersed costs."

That's a recipe for depleting the resource. If a herdsman were to leave a portion of the commons ungrazed, someone else would gain the benefit, so why leave it ungrazed? Soon, all the grass is gone, and the livestock die. That's the tragedy of the commons.

There are two possible solutions. One is to put someone in charge. But that someone would have arbitrary power over the rest — he may give his friends better terms — and one individual can't possibly know how to plan the village economy.

The second solution, as the pilgrims learned the hard way, is private property. Property rights unite costs and benefits. If a herdsman owns part of the pasture, he reaps not only 100 percent of the benefits of enlarging his herd but also 100 percent of the costs. Under thoseconditions, he behaves differently. If he undergrazes, uses fewer pesticides, etc., to make sure that the pasture flourishes next year, he can anticipate the future benefits. So, he has a strong incentive to be a good steward of the land.

This principle is pertinent today. People lament endangered species and call for government action. But that is the inferior "solution" already discussed. What we need is private property.

Cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs are never at risk of becoming endangered. What's special about them? Only that individuals own these animals and sell them. That gives livestock owners an incentive to keep them healthy and plentiful year after year.

The animals whose future we do worry about — whales and elephants, for example — are not typically subject to ownership. It's the tragedy of the commons.

Elephants are endangered because in much of Africa, poachers kill them for their tusks. Poachers have no incentive to expand herds, and neither does anyone else. Governments outlawed hunting and the ivory trade, but that hasn't stopped the loss of elephants. The plain is too vast to police it all.

Yet, where the property principle has been applied — however imperfectly — the fate of the elephants has been reversed. Villagers in Zimbabwe earn income by permitting hunting. In effect, the villagers have property rights in the herds. That changes attitudes. They'd be poorer if they let the elephants be hunted to extinction.

The result? "To say that we have too many elephants would be an understatement," Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management acting director E.W. Kanhanga said 2001.

The system is not perfect because individual property rights — which would create a stronger sense of responsibility — are not allowed. Moreover, the system has come under suspicion because cronies of Zimbabwe's despicable dictator, Robert Mugabe, are said to be killing elephants in game parks.

NEW YORK—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire, television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show. "The Wire has done what no other television program has come close to achieving—namely, presenting the life of a decaying American city and doing so with the scope and moral vision of great literature," said New York Times critic Virginia Heffernan, who was surprised to hear that the groundbreaking series had already started its fifth and final season in early January. "It sounds fantastic. I really wish I had HBO." Many reviewers from top media outlets assured reporters that they would start watching the Peabody Award–winning show just as soon as the first season reaches the top of their Netflix queues.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Christopher Hitchens is one of the nastiest, most disagreeable and odious guys out there, but he's right about the War on Terror and he's right about the outdated, farcical nature of the "Politics of Race and Gender." [Note: Hitchens now has a special place in my heart for blowing the whistle on Madeleine Albright, one of the most boneheaded nitwits to ever grace the political stage, and possibly the most imbecilic of all the Clinton Administration's loons.]

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The Perils of Identity Politics

By Christopher Hitchens

January 18, 2008

Let us give hearty thanks and credit to Rudy Giuliani, who has never by word or gesture implied that we would fracture any kind of "ceiling" if we elected as chief executive a man whose surname ends in a vowel.

Yet actually, it would be unprecedented if someone of Italian descent became the president of the United States and there was a time -- not long ago at that -- when the very idea would have aroused considerable passion. Now that it doesn't, is it not possible to think that that very indifference is the real "change"?

I recall thinking, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major-party ticket in 1984, that she would also, if elected, be the first vowel-ending Veep. Indeed, in San Francisco for the Democratic convention that year, I listened to the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti muse over drinks on the possibility of a future Cuomo-Ferraro "all wop" ticket.

The fact that these were now joking words and not fighting words struck me as happily suggestive. (I also thought that a President Walter Mondale would be a very high price to pay for having the first female vice president, and that President Mario Cuomo would be an even higher price to pay to prove that we no longer held any rooted prejudice against the descendants of Mediterranean immigrants.)

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of "race" or "gender" alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast avote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

Madeleine Albright has said that there is "a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Edwards and Michelle Obama don't deserve the help of fellow females? If the Republicans nominated a woman would Ms. Albright instantly switch parties out of sheer sisterhood? Of course not. (And this wearisome tripe from someone who was once our secretary of state . . .)

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think "first woman president." We think -- for example -- "first ex-co-president" or "first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent" or "first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap."

One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an "out" group, let alone a whole sex or gender.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like "a plantation," adding in a significant tone of voice that "you know what I mean . . ."

She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).

Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton's heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same.

What are we trying to "get over" here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a "white" American. He is as distant from the real "plantation" as I am. How -- unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so -- does this make him "black"?

Far from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us anchored in the past. The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of "race" as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is "one who believes that there are human races."

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my "race," unless I was permitted to put "human." The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put "white," which is not even a color let alone a "race," and I sternly declined to put "Caucasian," which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you "black."

I remember going to several of the mass events generated by Colin Powell's memoirs a few years ago, and being very touched by the eagerness with which young and old "white" people hoped he would give them the chance to elect (what would in fact have been) our first West Indian president. It was all book-tour hype as it turned out -- I could have told you that then -- but now it has resurfaced in a similarly naïve way.

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets . . . what? Not much.Similarly lightweight unqualified "white" candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he -- like me and like all of us -- carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is "a double standard" at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when -- as with the vowel -- we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice.

Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of "No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton" (Verso, 2000).

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Here's a timely list put together by Larry Elder on the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Before all of the Grotto's left-leaning readers get blotchy, apoplectic, and defensive, complaining about generalizations and offering up anecdote after anecdote to contradict the below points, hang on a sec.

Members of the Left tend to be ready to combat inconvenient truths with heartstring-tugging story after heartstring-tugging story (note the existence of Hollywood). I mean, if one last Iowa family out of millions was to be adversely affected by the disappearance of farm subsidies, that's all you need to shape your opinion that farm subsidies are good, right? Forget about what they do to prices for the rest of the poor people in America. . . .

If I say, in an argument, that the Dutch tend to be taller than the Japanese, my opponent could trot out a list of a thousand Dutchmen, each of whom is shorter than a thousand Japanese gentlemen on another list. OK, fine, but what about my point about the Dutch tending to be taller? It's still true isn't it?

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A Democrat or a Republican?By Larry ElderThursday, January 17, 2008

What Republicans Believe, What Democrats Believe

Republicans believe hard work wins, and government should allow you -- to the fullest extent possible -- to keep what you earn. Democrats believe that success results from luck, chance and happenstance, and therefore a just government takes from those who have and gives to those who do not.

Republicans believe in a colorblind society determined by drive, work ethic and talent. Democrats want a color-coordinated society. This explains the support for race and gender-based preferences to "correct" past sins and to create "diversity."

Republicans believe discrimination to fix previous discrimination remains discrimination, and that all a government can be is just in its own time. Democrats wish to use government to "rectify" past wrongs, which they hold responsible for today's "inequities."

Republicans believe that government should empower the individual -- that a government that taxes least taxes best. Democrats want individuals to empower government, and support policies that redistribute income from person A to "deserving" person B.

Republicans believe that the playing field, while unlevel, requires an individual to do the best he or she can with the cards dealt. Democrats consider life rigged, and that one's destiny rests on matters beyond the control of the individual.

Republicans believe that those who cannot help themselves can and will be helped out by other individuals -- not government -- as a result of basic human compassion. Democrats believe that because of one's misfortune, he or she is entitled to something -- via government -- from someone else.

Republicans believe in peace through strength, and thus support strong national defense, and -- in this era of Islamofascism -- a proactive foreign policy. Democrats believe in strength through peace, and believe they can better influence the behavior of enemies by demonstrating our good intentions.

Republicans believe in the mutual benefits of free trade of goods and services. Democrats believe in "fair trade," and support barriers that shield domestic industries against competition, reducing the incentive to innovate and change to remain competitive.

Republicans consider the Constitution a contract, limiting the duties, powers and obligations of the federal government. Democrats consider the Constitution a "living, breathing document," to be interpreted flexibly. Republicans, for example, reject Roe v. Wade because the court based it on a right to privacy, not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Democrats consider the right to privacy implied, despite the absence of any reference to it.

Republicans believe in the Second Amendment, and that it confers an individual right to keep and bear arms. The Founding Fathers wanted this right to protect against tyranny by government. Democrats consider the Second Amendment an impediment to public safety.

Michigan, six years ago, became one of about 40 "shall issue" states that now allow citizens to apply for a permit to carry concealed weapons. At the time, law enforcement officials predicted an increase in violent crime. In fact, the opposite happened.

Woodhaven Police Chief Michael Martin said, "I think the general consensus out there from law enforcement is that things were not as bad as we expected. There are problems with gun violence, but I think we can breathe a sigh of relief that what we anticipated didn't happen."

So how did the president of the Michigan chapter of the anti-gun group Million Moms March respond? She called the statistics bogus, and argued that even if true, society still possesses too many guns.

And this brings us to our final observation:

Republicans believe what they see, and Democrats see what they believe.

This is from the New York Times (I hope the blog doesn't hiss, shut down, or explode when I cut and paste something from the New York Times onto it). Thanks to Andrew M. and Mr. C. Goodman for this:

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December 30, 2007

Hugh Massingberd, 60, Laureate for the Departed, Dies

By MARGALIT FOX

Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, according to The Daily Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr. Massingberd’s death in an expansive obituary that described, not unkindly, his being “invariably strapped for cash” and the “gourmandism” and “bingeing” that had turned him “into an impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.”

Sometimes called the father of the modern British obituary, Mr. Massingberd was The Daily Telegraph’s obituaries editor from 1986 to 1994. He was also a shy autodidact who had never been to college; a past editor of Burke’s Peerage, the venerable record book of the titled families of Britain and Ireland; the author of dozens of books on the English aristocracy; a recognized authority on the country homes of England, stately and moldy alike; and a rabid theatergoer whose enthusiasm for “Phantom of the Opera” was undimmed by the fact that he had seen it more than 50 times and knew every word and every note by heart.

In 2002 The Spectator, a British weekly magazine, described Mr. Massingberd as “an English eccentric of the sort Hollywood imagines shoot snipe in their underpants.”

Mr. Massingberd did not actually shoot snipe in his underpants, but he did once pose for a photograph dressed as a Roman emperor garlanded with sausages, as his obituary in The Daily Telegraph helpfully reminded readers on Thursday.

Traditionally, the obituary departments of most newspapers were little Siberias, and The Daily Telegraph’s was no exception when Mr. Massingberd arrived. The long, leaden recitals of awards, club memberships and honorary degrees massed on the page were distasteful pills that writers, and readers, choked down dutifully each day.

Mr. Massingberd transformed the paper’s obituaries from ponderous, sycophantic eulogies into mordant, warts-and-all profiles of the delectable departed. His model, he often said, was the 17th-century English writer John Aubrey, whose collection of biographical sketches, “Brief Lives,” offered gossipy backstairs portraits of eminences of the time.

In Mr. Massingberd’s hands the newspaper obituary became unabashed entertainment, and the page attracted a passionate following that endures to this day. It also helped to set a benchmark for newspapers throughout Britain, where obituaries are now far more irreverent, more editorial and more prurient than their American counterparts. (Witness The Daily Telegraph’s send-off of one Lt. Col. Geoffrey Knowles, “who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear — he survived but the bear expired.”)

Typically unsigned, Daily Telegraph obituaries are written by a stable of contributors. But during Mr. Massingberd’s tenure, observers widely agreed, every obit in the paper bore his droll, distinctive stamp. Naturally, he covered the presidents, kings and captains of industry who are the grist of obit pages everywhere. But Mr. Massingberd also sought out eccentrics; having the good fortune to live in Britain, he found them.

One Daily Telegraph obituary, from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.”

Another, from 1988, memorialized Peter Langan, a London restaurateur: “Often he would pass out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers’ ankles.”

And there was this much-quoted line, also from 1988, which appeared in The Daily Telegraph’s obituary of John Allegro. A once-renowned scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mr. Allegro later advanced a theory that Judaism and Christianity were the products of an ancient cult that worshiped sex and mushrooms. His obit in The Daily Telegraph pronounced him “the Liberace of biblical scholarship.”

To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:

¶“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.

¶“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.

¶“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.

¶“A man of simple tastes”:

A complete vulgarian.

¶“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.

¶“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.

¶“Relished physical contact”:

A sadist.

¶“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.

Hugh John Montgomery was born on Dec. 30, 1946, in Cookham Dean, in the Berkshire district of England. His family, The Daily Mail wrote in 1994, were members of the “stranded gentry.” Hugh’s mother was a schoolteacher; his father worked for the BBC.

But as young Hugh was dreamily aware, the Montgomerys had nobler roots: Through their blue-blooded Massingberd relatives, he stood to inherit two country houses. In the 1960s, in the hope of securing one, Hugh’s father changed the family name to Montgomery-Massingberd. But both inheritances fell through. In the 1990s Hugh shortened his name to Massingberd.

As a young man, Mr. Massingberd planned to go to Cambridge University, thought better of it and took a job as a law clerk. Hating the work, he found his way to Burke’s Peerage, where from 1971 to 1983 he was the chief editor.

When Mr. Massingberd joined The Daily Telegraph as obituaries editor, he later said in interviews, friends regarded him with a mixture of pity and contempt. But he realized two things immediately: First, that a subject’s passage from cradle to grave furnishes writers with a built-in narrative thread from which to spin a ripping good yarn. Second, that personal stories, the odder the better, can be the stuff of deep, life-affirming levity.

One story belonged to this man, the John Allegro of the piano:

“The first sign that Liberace had embarked upon a road along which reticence would never ride came when he placed a candelabra on his piano. At this, the dam of discretion appeared to burst: first came a white tail suit, followed by stage patter about his mother and his philosophy of life, then a gold lamé jacket and a diamond-studded tailcoat.”

Mr. Massingberd’s first marriage, to Christine Martinoni, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Caroline Ripley, known as Ripples; and two children from his first marriage, Harriet and Luke.

His books include “Royal Palaces of Europe” (Vendome, 1983); “Blenheim Revisited: The Spencer-Churchills and Their Palace” (Beaufort Books, 1985); “Her Majesty the Queen” (Collins, 1985); a memoir, “Daydream Believer: Confessions of a Hero Worshipper” (Macmillan, 2001); and six anthologies of Daily Telegraph obituaries, which, he often said, made splendid bedtime reading.

Mr. Massingberd also belonged to a spate of respectable clubs, but they will not be itemized here.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

"If not the greatest evil, yet war is a great evil. Therefore, we should all like to remove it if we can. But every war leads to another war. The removal of war must therefore be attempted. We must increase by propaganda the number of Pacifists in each nation until it becomes great enough to deter that nation from going to war. This seems to me wild work. Only liberal societies tolerate Pacifists. In the liberal society, the number of Pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not. If not, you have done nothing. If it is largeenough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbour who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no Pacifists."

Unlike global warming, I think one of the few issues about which it can be said that "the debate is over" is that of low taxes being in the best interests of EVERYONE at ALL times. . . .

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REVIEW & OUTLOOK

A Supply-Side World

January 7, 2008 Page A12

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Democrats in Congress remain committed to raising taxes on grounds that tax rates don't much matter to economic growth, and in any case they only help the rich. They may be the last public officials on the planet to believe this. In recent weeks alone, some of the unlikeliest political leaders have endorsed tax rate cuts in the name of making their economies better.

Start in Europe, where Socialist Party Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pledged in December that if re-elected, "One of the first decisions I would take is to eliminate the wealth tax [up to 2.5%]," which he says is one of the highest in Europe and "punishes savings." Mr. Zapatero is no conservative. But he's joining the European march down the Laffer Curve on taxes, having already phased in reductions in Spain's corporate tax rate to 30% from 35% and its personal income tax rate to 43% from 45%.

Like France and Germany, Spain is cutting rates because of the tax competition from their European Union neighbors such as Ireland and East Europe. There are now at least 11 nations formerly behind the Iron Curtain with flat rate taxes of 25% or lower. On January 1, a new flat tax of 10% became law in Bulgaria, replacing its progressive rate structure and as far aswe knowthe lowest such rate in the world. The newly elected Polish parliament is also planning to cut taxes, though an earlier flat-tax proposal earned a veto threat from the president.

And this just in: In the Middle East, Kuwait has decided to slash its corporate income tax on foreign companies to 15% from 55%. Finance Minister Mostafa al-Shemali argued for the cut, noting that Kuwait attracted less than $300 million in foreign investment last year, compared to some $18 billion in lower-tax Saudi Arabia (which has a religious tax but no corporate or income tax on Saudi nationals). "This law will encourage foreign investors to enter Kuwait," says Ahmed Baqer, head of the parliament's finance panel.

It's getting lonelier all the time at the top for America, which with a corporate tax rate of 35% is one of the few developed nations left with a rate of more than 30%. Economist Dan Mitchell tracks these trends for the Cato Institute, and he finds that 26 developed nations have cut either personal or corporate income tax rates since 2005. Since 1980, OECD nations have sliced their average personal income tax rate by 24 percentage points, to 40% from 64%. Corporate tax rates have fallen by more than 20 percentage points. Foreign leaders have learned that, in a world of easy global capitalflows, high tax rates chase away investment and entrepreneurs.

Some of these tax-cutting nations -- such as Estonia, Ireland, Russia and Spain -- have seen revenues rise even as rates have fallen. This is what turns socialists into supply-siders in Spain, if regrettably not in the U.S.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

I want to know what a typical leftist university professor would say if you asked him point blank if he thought students should be exposed to a range of viewpoints in the classroom. It would probably be a good idea to specify by example what you mean by "range of ideas." In other words, you don't mean that for every lecture or reading on the equality of all mankind you need to balance it out with a lecture or reading saying that slavery is a wonderful institution. More like, in a course about imperialism, in addition to covering all of the unspeakable evils unleashed on the developing world by Western white males, you might want to have a chapter or lecture about a good thing or two that resulted, like medicine and infrastructure. Oh, well.

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As a Republican, I'm on the Fringe

By Robert MarantoSunday, December 9, 2007; B01

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities' role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "God and Man at Yale" -- in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others -- making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I've taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused "a sensation" at his university. "It was as if I had become a child molester," he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because "you don't want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts."

I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently "fit" better than I did. At least that's what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn't believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.)

Now there is more data backing up experiences like mine. Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us. Among the findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservativeundergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.

Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate.The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book "Whose Welfare?," the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn't working -- yet many sociology professors even now deny that '70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients.Similarly, despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

In my own area, public administration, it took years for bureaucracy-defending professors to realize that then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (aka Reinventing Government) was not a reactionary attempt to destroy government agencies, but rather a centrist attempt to revitalize them. Most of the critics of the academy are conservatives or libertarians, but even the left-of-center E.D. Hirsch argues in "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" that academics in schools of education have harmed young people by promoting progressive dogma rather than examining what works in real classrooms.

All this is bad for society becauseacademics' ideological blinders make it more difficult to solve domestic problems and to understand foreign challenges.Moreover, a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas, a point made by academic critics across the ideological spectrum from Russell Jacoby on the left to Josiah Bunting III on the right.

It's odd that my university was one of only a handful in Pennsylvania to have held a debate on the Iraq War in 2003. That happened because left-leaning Villanova professors realized that to be fair they needed to expose students to views different from their own, so they invited three relatively conservative faculty members to take part in a discussion of the decision to invade. Though I was then a junior faculty member arguing the unpopular (pro-war) side, I knew that my senior colleagues would not hold it against me.

Yet a conservative friend at another university had an equal and opposite experience. When he told his department chair that he and a liberal colleague planned to publicly debate the decision to invade Iraq, his chair talked him out of it, saying that it could complicate his tenure decision two years down the road. On the one hand, the department chair was doing his job, protecting a junior faculty member from unfair treatment; on the other hand, he shouldn't have had to.

Unfortunately, critics are too often tone deaf about the solutions to academia's problems. Conservative activist David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, a group he supports, advocate an Academic Bill of Rights guaranteeing equality for ideological minorities (typically conservatives) and ensuring that faculty are hired and promoted and students graded solely on the basis of their competence and knowledge, not their ideology or religion. That sounds great in theory, but it could have the unintended consequence of encouraging any student who gets a C to plead ideological bias.

Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life.

Robert Maranto is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and co-editor of "Reforming the Politically Correct University," to be published in 2008.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

The title of the column below is Why Atheists Are So Angry. I don't know what the true answer is, but there are two obvious possibilities:

1) The atheists, as D'Souza notes, are more or less angry AT God for existing. This reminds me of when C.S. Lewis was a young atheist at Oxford. He says in his book Surprised by Joy that he was very angry at God for not existing. . . .

2) The atheists need to field a better debater, rather than trot out fellows who keep getting their asses handed to them by Dinesh D'Souza.

Enjoy!

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Why Atheists Are So AngryBy Dinesh D'SouzaSunday, December 9, 2007

If you haven't seen my “God v. Atheism” debate with philosopher Daniel Dennett, you can view it at Tothesource.org. You should read the comments in response to the debate both on my AOL blog as well as on the atheist site richarddawkins.net. From the atheists you hear statements like this: "D'Souza is a goddamned idiot." "Odious little toad." "D'Souza is full of s**t." "A smug, joyless twit." "Total moron." "Little turd." "Two-faced liar." Etc, etc. Now admittedly the topic of God v. atheism can be an emotional one, but you will find no comparable invective on the Christian side. Why then are so many atheists so angry?

One reason I think is that they are God-haters. Atheists often like to portray themselves as "unbelievers" but this is not strictly accurate. If they were mere unbelievers they would simply live their lives as if God did not exist. I don't believe in unicorns, but then I haven't written any books called The End of Unicorns, Unicorns are Not Great, or The Unicorn Delusion. Clearly the atheists go beyond disbelief; they are on the warpath against God. And you can hear their bitterness not only in their book titles but also in their mean-spirited invective.

Here is a second reason the atheists sound so angry. They are not used to having their sophistries exposed. For the past three years the new atheists have had a virtually free ride. Dawkins and Hitchens make outrageous claims ("religion poisons everything") and media pundits like Lou Dobbs and Tim Russert fawn all over them. But in the past few months I've been meeting the leading atheist spokesmen in open debate, and challenging them on the basis of the same reason and science and evidence that they say vindicates their claims.

After my first debate with Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, several atheists on Dawkins' site said, "Well, D'Souza won that debate, but wait till he meets Hitchens. Hitchens will wipe the floor with him. D'Souza RIP." Then after I debated Hitchens the atheists said, "Oh no, this one didn't go as planned. Hitchens didn't do so well." Another commented that atheists could not afford to lose two in a row. Even so, one atheist hopefully noted that Hitchens was not the right guy to debate me; rather, Daniel Dennett has the scholarly weight to do the job.

Now after my Dennett debate, what's the verdict? Well, the audience was full of Dennett supporters who began with enthusiastic applause for him but, as the debate went on, fell largely silent. Several came up to me afterward and told me that I had won. Dennett himself seemed dispirited after the event. Even so, when I posted the debate on my blog, the atheists went into damage control mode. The debate was instantly posted on atheist sites, and atheists rushed to my AOL blog to vote Dennett the winner. This effort gave atheists an early lead, but when the votes were tallied I was the victor. Interestingly my margin of victory was even bigger than that for the resolution, suggesting that several people voted that "God Is a Man-Made Invention" and still thought I won the debate.

A good way to assess a debate is to see what the partisans on each side say. Among Christians the verdict is unanimous. Here’s a sample comment from a Townhall reader: "My heart went out to Professor Dennett because he was so totally over-matched in this debate You totally demolished him as you have the other atheists you have debated." But all you have to do is to go to atheist sites to see that many atheists also think that I won, although this is sometimes very grudgingly admitted.

Here is a sampling of comments that I've taken from richarddawkins.net. "I was at the debate and thought Dennett did not prove his point." "I'm so tired of these D'Souza debates. The more people we send his way the larger his smile grows." "I feel such debates should stop." "I love Dennett's ideas about atheism but I do think he handled this debate poorly against Dinesh." "Ok, Dennett sucked...Dennett's type of responses just made him look like an ass." "Dinesh is an amazingly talented orator, considering how hopeless a case he is arguing." "Hitchens has had a shot, as has Dennett, and neither has succeeded in demolishing D'Souza. D'Souza has a very effective debating technique. Not only did a lot of atheists get up and fire straw-man arguments at D'Souza that he was easily able to counter and make them look foolish, but Dennett...lost his composure and his train of thought." "Let's face it, this guy has taken our best shots and still come out looking good. Maddening."

So where does this leave the atheists? These guys now seem to be 0-3. Some of the blog posters on Dawkins' site are calling on Sam Harris and Dawkins himself to step into the ring. Harris seems willing, although he has approached me about doing a written rather than an oral debate. Dawkins continues to avoid my invitation to debate on a secular West Coast campus, leading one atheist to dub him Richard the Chickenhearted. I really hope that Dawkins proves he has the courage of his convictions. (How brave is it to beat up on former televangelist Ted Haggard?)

Otherwise the self-styled "brights" are going to face the empirical fact that when it comes to defending their views, atheists are basically losers. Remarkably, the "party of reason" is simply incompetent to vindicate those claims against an advocate of the "party of faith." Now what could be more embarrassing than that?

Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About Christianity has just been released. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Certain issues are simple, and need not be made complicated for the sake of debate. The Death Tax is one of them. Morally, it is sick. As Professor Goldberg rightly points out, "If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax."

Terry B. and I had a sociology prof at Georgetown freshman or sophomore year, Dr. Mashayekhi, who proclaimed to his captive audience that he believed that ALL human beings should have to start with a clean slate, with nothing. He favored outlawing any sort of transfer of wealth from one generation to another. Needless to say, I'm sure he was looked at by his colleagues as a moderate, not a true radical. On a university campus, when discussing the evils of capitalism and commerce, anything short of the guillotine is ineffective in taking care of the second part of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable."

We don't normally look to Tinsel Town liberals for insights on U.S. tax policy, but Whoopi Goldberg's comments on the estate tax last week deserve more attention.

During a discussion of Republican Presidential candidates on ABC's "The View," which the comedian co-hosts, Ms. Goldberg said, "I'd like somebody to get rid of the death tax. That's what I want. I don't want to get taxed just because I died." The studio audience started applauding, but she wasn't done. "I just don't think it's right," she continued. "If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax. Why should I have to pay it again because I died?"

Back in 2001, before President Bush signed estate tax reform into law, the death duty topped off at 55% on estates worth more than $3 million. Today the top federal rate is 45% with an exemption of $2 million, and under current law the rate falls to zero in 2010. In 2011, however, the death tax is resurrected, with the top rate restored to 55% and the exemption set at $1 million.

When another co-host, Joy Behar, responded to Ms. Goldberg's remarks by asserting, "Only people with a lot of money say that," Ms. Goldberg shot back, "No, I don't think so . . . It doesn't matter if you have or don't have money. Once you paid your taxes, it should be a done deal. You shouldn't have to pay twice."

Ms. Goldberg has her political facts down. It's not just "people with a lot of money" who oppose confiscatory estate taxes. Billionaires like Warren Buffett have made a crusade of urging Congress to keep the death tax, even as he shelters much of his own wealth from that tax by giving to charity. However, according to polls, some 70% of voters favor a full repeal. And many, like Ms. Goldberg apparently, do so on moral grounds. Death as a taxable event and double taxation offend the average American's sense of fairness.

Friday, December 07, 2007

Check out the elephant example. This column helps to show how so much bad policy is simply based on people trying to feel better, rather than on actual consequences. . . .

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Tragedy of the Commons IIBy John StosselWednesday, December 5, 2007

My Thanksgiving column about how the pilgrims nearly starved practicing communal farming but thrived once they switched to private cultivation made some people angry. One commented, "Sharing of the fruits of our labor is a bad thing?"

I never said that.

I practice charity regularly. I believe in sharing. But when government takes our money by force and gives it to others, that's not sharing.

And sharing can't be a basis for production -- you can't share what hasn't been produced. My point is that production and prosperity require property rights. Property rights associate effort with benefits. Where benefits are unrelated to effort, people do the least amount necessary to get by while taking the most they can get. Economists have a pithy way of summing up this truth: No one washes a rental car.

It's called the "tragedy of the commons." The idea is as old as ancient Greece, but ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the phrase in a 1968 Science magazine article. Hardin described a common pasture on which anyone may graze his livestock. Each person will benefit from a larger herd but will suffer only a tiny fraction of the negative effects of overgrazing. Public Choice economists call this "concentrated benefits and dispersed costs."

That's a recipe for depleting the resource. If a herdsman were to leave a portion of the commons ungrazed, someone else would gain the benefit, so why leave it ungrazed? Soon, all the grass is gone, and the livestock die. That's the tragedy of the commons.

There are two possible solutions. One is to put someone in charge. But that someone would have arbitrary power over the rest -- he may give his friends better terms -- and one individual can't possibly know how to plan the village economy.

The second solution, as the pilgrims learned the hard way, is private property. Property rights unite costs and benefits. If a herdsman owns part of the pasture, he reaps not only 100 percent of the benefits of enlarging his herd but also 100 percent of the costs. Under those conditions, he behaves differently. If he undergrazes, uses fewer pesticides, etc., to make sure that the pasture flourishes next year, he can anticipate the future benefits. So, he has a strong incentive to be a good steward of the land.

This principle is pertinent today. People lament endangered species and call for government action. But that is the inferior "solution" already discussed. What we need is private property.

Cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs are never at risk of becoming endangered. What's special about them? Only that individuals own these animals and sell them. That gives livestock owners an incentive to keep them healthy and plentiful year after year.

The animals whose future we do worry about -- whales and elephants, for example -- are not typically subject to ownership. It's the tragedy of the commons.

Elephants are endangered because in much of Africa, poachers kill them for their tusks. Poachers have no incentive to expand herds, and neither does anyone else. Governments outlawed hunting and the ivory trade, but that hasn't stopped the loss of elephants. The plain is too vast to police it all.

Yet, where the property principle has been applied -- however imperfectly -- the fate of the elephants has been reversed. Villagers in Zimbabwe earn income by permitting hunting. In effect, the villagers have property rights in the herds. That changes attitudes. They'd be poorer if they let the elephants be hunted to extinction.

The result? "To say that we have too many elephants would be an understatement," Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management acting director E.W. Kanhanga said in 2001.

The system is not perfect because individual property rights -- which would create a stronger sense of responsibility -- are not allowed. Moreover, the system has come under suspicion because cronies of Zimbabwe's despicable dictator, Robert Mugabe, are said to be killing elephants in game parks.

Monday, November 26, 2007

In his "I Have a Dream" speech forty-four years ago, MLK dreamed that one day people wouldn't be judged by the color of their skin.

What would he think of the University of Delaware's positively sick program of indoctrination for incoming students? If you are white, I'll bet you didn't realize that your chances of being a racist are not 99%, not 99.99%, but 100%.

Here's a quote from the Delaware playbook:

"A racist: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists. . . ."

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Jewish World Review

Nov. 7, 2007

Academic Cesspools II

By Walter Williams

The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what's going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students. The following excerpts are taken from the University of Delaware's Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document. The full document is available at www.thefire.org.

Students living in the University's housing, roughly 7,000, are taught: "A racist: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)" This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct, if you're white, you're a racist.

If you're white and disagree with racial quotas, preferences and openly racist statements made by blacks to whites, and you call it reverse racism or reverse discrimination, here's the document's message for you: "Reverse racism: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give 'preferential treatment' to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as 'reverse racism.'" I agree with the last sentence. Racism is racism irrespective of color.

A white University of Delaware student might not have an ounce of ill will toward any race. According to the university's document, he's a racist anyway. "A non-racist: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called 'blaming the victim'). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent."

Then the document asks, "Have you ever heard a well-meaning white person say, 'I'm not a member of any race except the human race?' What she usually means by this statement is that she doesn't want to perpetuate racial categories by acknowledging that she is white. This is an evasion of responsibility for her participation in a system based on supremacy for white people."

I doubt whether this racist nonsense is restricted to the university's housing program. Students are probably taught similar nonsense in their sociology, psychology and political science classes. FIRE's outing of the University of Delaware's racist program elicited this official response from Vice President Michael Gilbert, "The central mission of the University, and of the program, is to cultivate both learning and the free exchange of ideas." (According to thefire.org, as a result of public exposure, and without condemning this racist program, on Nov. 2 President Patrick Harker ordered the mandatory re-education halted pending a review.)

It's a safe bet the university did not highlight this kind of learning experience to parents and students in its recruitment efforts. Nor were generous donors and alumni informed that they are racists by birth. I'd also guess that this kind of "education" was kept under wraps from the state legislators who use taxpayer money to fund the university.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

I'd like to write a massive essay about this topic, but I am late for Thanksgiving dinner. Also, the column below says it all.

Ever wonder if socialism might work well in a smaller, more-manageable community of people who care about each other? The Pilgrims tried it, and you know what happened? They almost starved to death.

This is one of the best columns the Grotto has come across in weeks.

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The Tragedy of the CommonsBy John StosselWednesday, November 21, 2007

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. "Isn't sharing wonderful?" say the teachers.

They miss the point.

Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.

The failure of Soviet communism is only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. Some ate rats, dogs, horses and cats. This went on for two years.

"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, [I] (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

The people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many. "

Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623.

What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. But the problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."

When action is divorced from consequences, no one is happy with the ultimate outcome. If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty and will not be refilled -- a bad situation even for the earlier takers.

What private property does -- as the Pilgrims discovered -- is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.

Secure property rights are the key. When producers know that their future products are safe from confiscation, they will take risks and invest. But when they fear they will be deprived of the fruits of their labor, they will do as little as possible.

That's the lost lesson of Thanksgiving.

John Stossel is an award-winning news correspondent and author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel--Why Everything You Know is Wrong.

Here's one that CFC IV caught in the New York Times Magazine. Yet another clue that the United States may decline and fall due to the spreading school- and parent-sponsored sensitivity and self-esteem fetish.

The fact that these old Sesame Street DVDs are seriously, humorlessly labeled as "intended for grownups" causes me to find myself in the too-frequent state where I have to decide whether to laugh or cry. I think I may do neither and just start throwing items against walls.

If you're worried that your kid might be scerwed up by viewing Cookie Monster's "Alistair Cookie" on "Monsterpiece Theater" smoking a pipe, I suggest that your child has far scarier things to worry about, like having a total loser for a parent. . . .

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Sweeping the Clouds Away

By Virginia Heffernan

from New York Times Magazine

November 18, 2007

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Thanks to Mike Fishkin for flagging this top-notch entry for the "Political Correctness Files." Apparently the idiotic anti-snowball-throwing-policy-enforcing morons advising Shore Country Day School have also been hired by the city of Sydney, Australia. Again, these soft-soled-shoe-wearing halfwits fail to make the distinction between things in life that are "Their Problem" vs. things in life that are "Somebody Else's Problem." I suggest that taking offense at a Santa saying "Ho Ho Ho," or having a nervous breakdown because you're worried that your kid will get beaned by a snowball at recess, resulting in a life-ruining loss of self-esteem, or taking offense at a bar displaying booze bottles, or taking offense at our nation's currency saying "In God We Trust" are all examples of things that are "Your Problem." Not the city's problem, not the courts' problem, not the school's problem. If you are the bitter, humorless, angry type to get worked up about this kind of stuff, try a strategy that's been working for years for many of your brethren: Keep it to yourself and be unhappy in the privacy of your own miserable existence.

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November 14, 2007

SYDNEY (AFP) - Santas in Australia's largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas's traditional "ho ho ho" greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.

One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute.

"Gimme a break," said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.

"We are talking about little kids who do not understand that "ho, ho, ho" has any other connotation and nor should they," she told the Telegraph.

"Leave Santa alone."

A local spokesman for the US-based Westaff recruitment firm said it was "misleading" to say the company had banned Santa's traditional greeting and it was being left up to the discretion of the individual Santa himself.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Here is a thought-provoking column that approaches the issue from a cultural perspective rather than in terms of faith and doctrine. This way, D'Souza sort of meets the atheists on their own turf. I think the man from Tonga hits the nail on the head. . . .

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What Has Atheism Done for Us?By Dinesh D'SouzaWednesday, October 31, 2007

My new book What’s So Great About Christianity, just out, is already an amazon.com bestseller, a Wall Street Journal bestseller and No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list. On Saturday C-Span broadcast my debate with God Is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens. Many people have commented that this is the best debate on the topic of Christianity v. Atheism thathas yet been held. If you haven’t seen it, you can find the debate on my website dineshdsouza.com. Following the debate, AOL posted the video on its main page, and asked people to make up their minds and vote on who won. Modesty prevents me from disclosing the answer.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, watched the debate and reported with some agitation that the audience seemed to be applauding more for me than for Hitchens. Dawkins commented on his website that the New York crowd must have been a "dopey" lot. But if you listen to the debate, you will see that both atheists and believers were well represented. The audience applause was initially stronger for Hitchens, and only as the debate went on did it trend markedly toward me. So is Dawkins suggesting that the audience was very intelligent to start with but became more "dopey" as the debate went on? More likely we are seeing evidence of the "Dawkins delusion," an unwillingness to use good sense and face facts when Dawkins' own belief system is called into question.

One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man wasasking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism.

In my response, I noted that when the missionaries came to India, they sometimes converted people by force. Even so, many Indians rushed on their own to embrace the faith of the foreigners. And why? Because they were born into the low caste of the Hindus. As long as they remained Hindus, there was no escape; even their descendants were condemned to the lowest rungs of humanity. By fleeing into the arms of themissionaries, the low-caste Hindus found themselves welcomed as Christian brothers. They discovered the ideal of equal dignity in the eyes of God.

If we look at the history of Western civilization, we find that Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture. Read the new atheist books and make a list of the institutions and values that Hitchens and Dawkins and the others cherish the most.They value the idea of the individual, and the right to dissent, and science as an autonomous enterprise, and representative democracy, and human rights, and equal rights for women and racial minorities, and the movement to end slavery, and compassion as asocial virtue. But when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity. If Christianity did not exist, these values would not exist in the form they do now. So there is indeed something great aboutChristianity, and the honest atheist should be willing to admit this.

By contrast, does it make any sense to say, as Hitchens does in his book's subtitle, that "religion poisons everything"? Religion didn't poison Dante or Milton or Donne or Michelangelo or Raphael or Titian or Bach! Religon didn’t poison those unnamed architectural geniuses who built the great Gothic cathedrals. Religion didn’t poison the American founders who were for the most part not Deist but Christian. Religion didn't poison the anti-slavery campaigns of William Lloyd Garrison or William Wilberforce, or the civil rights activism of the Reverend Martin Luther King.The real question to ask is, what does atheism offer humanity? In Tonga, as in America, the answer appears to be: Nothing.

Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About Christianity has just been released. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

There must be a vast conspiracy to create a whole generation of weak, whimpering losers (that's the most accurate word). Check out this newspaper letter blasting the Utah booze commissioner for wanting bars to "cover up" the bottles in case some featherweight crybaby is "offended" by them.

I don't know where to start. First of all, the ability of people to use basic intellectual tools like reason and logic to distinguish between things that are "their problem" and things that are "someone else's problem" is on the way out, since so many schools seem to opt for letting students "go with the flow" and decide how to educate themselves rather than sitting them down in a chair and teaching them something.

I want to meet somebody who is "offended" by a bottle of Stoli lurking out of the corner of his eye as he sits in a restaurant or bar. The real question is, who could this person possibly be having dinner with? Who wants to hang out with somebody this awful? Well, the "offended-by-the-sight-of-booze" guy is probably dining with his militant atheist friend who is shocked and appalled that his kid might have to sit in silence for a few moments at school during a prayer. Or maybe he's dining with the dumb administrator at my own old school, Shore Country Day, who decided that ALL snowball throwing shall be punishable.

You heard me. At my old school, if you are a third grade boy trying to decompress at recess with your buddies, you may not, under any circumstances, make and throw a snowball. I guess playing with toy guns or swords, like boys have done for literally thousands of years, is such an absurd idea to today's parents that if you were to bring it up, the whole place would just collapse in laughter. People would be slapping you on the back for thinking of such a hilarious, off-the-wall scenario as a little boy playing Cops & Robbers or Cowboys & Indians (er. . . maybe that's Cowboys & Native Americans. . . .).

Another possible dinner companion for this loser might be the person whose kid gets nipped at once by a Yorkshire Terrier on West Beach in Beverly Farms, where I grew up. That's right: now it is illegal to walk on the beach with your dog off-leash, year-round. If I had just bought a beautiful house in B. Farms and arrived in town with my family and dogs, and I found out that some drama queen (male or female) freaked out because a dog snarled at his kid, I would have to do what is referred to as "go ballistic."

If people who compare the U.S. to Rome are right, and our country declines and falls, I believe it will be because we have produced a whole generation of cream puffs.

Thanks to CFC IV for this one. I saw an interview last year in which Chris Wallace asked his dad, Mike Wallace (age 135), if he thought the media was biased, and Mike Wallace laughed and said that the idea was ridiculous. What an ass.

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Even Harvard Finds the Media Biased

Investor's Business Daily

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Just like so many reports before it, a joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — hardly a bastion of conservative orthodoxy — found that in covering the current presidential race, themedia are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans.

Democrats are not only favored in the tone of the coverage. They get more coverage period. This is particularly evident on morning news shows, which "produced almost twice as many stories (51% to 27%) focused on Democratic candidates than on Republicans."

The most flagrant bias, however, was found in newspapers. In reviewing front-page coverage in 11 newspapers, the study found the tone positive in nearly six times as many stories about Democrats as it was negative.

Breaking it down by candidates, the survey found that Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the favorites. "Obama's front page coverage was 70% positive and 9% negative, and Clinton's was similarly 61% positive and 13% negative."

In stories about Republicans, on the other hand, the tone was positive in only a quarter of the stories; in four in 10 it was negative.

The study also discovered that newspaper stories "tended to be focused more on political matters and less on issues and ideas than the media overall. In all, 71% of newspaper stories concentrated on the 'game,' compared with 63% overall."

Television has a similar problem. Only 10% of TV stories were focused on issues, and here, too, Democrats get the better of it.

Reviewing 154 stories on evening network newscasts over the course of 109 weeknights, the survey found that Democrats were presented in a positive light more than twice as often as they were portrayed as negative. Positive tones for Republicans were detected in less than a fifth of stories while a negative tone was twiceas common.

The gap between Democrats and Republicans narrows on cable TV, but it's there nonetheless. Stories about Democrats were positive in more than a third of the cases, while Republicans were portrayed favorably in fewer than 29%. Republican led in unfriendly stories 30.4% to 25.5%.

CNN was the most hostile toward Republicans, MSNBC, surprisingly, the most positive. MSNBC was also the most favorable toward Democrats (47.2%), Fox (36.8%) the most critical.

The anti-GOP attitude also lives on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." There, Democrats were approvingly covered more than a third as often as Republicans. Negative coverage of Democrats was a negligible 5.9%. It seemed to be reserved for Republicans, who were subject to one-fifth of the program's disparaging reports.

Even talk radio, generally considered a bastion of conservatism, has been relatively rough on the GOP. On conservative shows, Obama got more favorable treatment (27.8%) than Rudy Giuliani (25%). Sen. John McCain got a 50% favorability rating while Mitt Romney led the three GOP candidates with 66.7%.

The PEG-Shorenstein effort is only the latest to conclude that the mainstream media tilt left. Others include Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter's groundbreaking 1986 book "The Media Elite"; "A Measure of Media Bias," a 2005 paper written by professors from UCLA and the University of Missouri; and Bernard Goldberg's two books, "Bias" and "Arrogance." All underscore the media's leftward leanings.

The media, of course, insist they are careful to keep personal opinions out of their coverage. But the facts tell another story — one that can't be edited or spiked.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Note: The nice thing about the ol' blogaroo is that, unlike a paper that's going to be graded, a given post can merely be a rant-and-rave if it pleases the Editor!

In the following column by Alvaro Vargas Llosa, you will see that the average income per person worldwide has grown from an inflation-adjusted $2 a day to $17 a day over the past 200 years, thanks to free market capitalism.

As long as we're talking about averages, I'll just say that your average liberal, schlepping around Cambridge or Berkeley in his gray ponytail and comfortable shoes before hopping into the Prius to pick up the kid from a soccer practice where they don't keep score (because he's probably a stay-at-home dad anyway), might start blasting free market capitalism and America (the greatest creator of wealth and prosperity the world has ever known) upon hearing this.

His argument might be a mess of bad generalizations about income inequality, white privilege, greedy old-boy-network, Dick Cheney-and-pals backroom profit manipulation and creation at the expense of the Little Guy, sprinkled with references to Big Oil and melting icebergs.

When confronted with a slew of easy-to-understand things called facts that demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that today's average welfare recipient lives a lot higher on the hog, longer, and healthier than your average king or queen of England did back in the day (read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth or rent Braveheart and then tell me if life would be easier as king back then or as a bum today), the liberal in question might start bringing up stories of his friend, a single, hardworking mother struggling to raise her kids in the face of a cold and heartless insurance company or a mean boss down at the minimum wage Burger King where she works.

OK, fine. We could spend all day recounting the stories of those who slip through the cracks (that's what Hollywood is there for). The last time I checked, we live in a place called the real world, and in the real world choices have to be made among imperfect alternatives.

It's like the shocked and outraged folks on TV who learn of an instance of a war crime committed by a U.S. soldier and talk about it like it's an argument for getting rid of the military or something. Has this person ever heard of an area of study called statistics, or maybe probability? Take 100,000 young soldiers in their teens and twenties and put them in a foreign country, scared out of their wits much of the time. Is the expectation that 0% of these guys will do something bad? If the expectation is 1/10 of 1%, then that'll give you 100 war crimes. If 12% of those get exposed in the media, that's one war crime per month to write about. Is that a reason to shut down the armed forces?

Likewise, there will always be losers in a free market economy, some of them penalized unjustly and unfairly. But to stand there like John Edwards and argue that things are pretty darn bad for the average American is stupid. Each and every morning I walk into Dunkin' Donuts. Each and every morning there is the same group of retired guys there, sitting around in their Red Sox windbreakers with their massive guts hanging all over the place, complaining about George Bush or some other topic they've carefully studied. Sure, maybe one or two of these guys really gave it his all throughout life and was met by adversity and calamity at every turn. There will always be people like this, just as there will always be people who get lung cancer never having puffed on a single cigarette. But I guarantee you that the vast majority of these guys graduated from high school, took union jobs, and punched the clock for thirty years, moaning the whole time.

Who thinks that a guy like this SHOULD have anything approaching income equality with the other guy who has worked hard and made short term sacrifices for the sake of some long term goals? Keep in mind that when politicians refer to "My Fellow Americans" or "The Working Guy" what they mean, whether they know it or not, is "My Fellow, Fairly Lazy Americans" or "The Barely-Working Guy Who Reluctantly Does as Little Work as Possible."

By the same token, there will always be individuals born into privilege who are funneled through the best schools, to the best firms, and everything comes up roses, and they DON'T work hard. That's also obvious if you look at it from a probability standpoint. So what? Deal with it.

Well, that's quite a rant, I realize. Here's the article:

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Wealth and Nations

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa

MONTERREY, Mexico -- Is global capitalism making the poor even poorer, or is it in fact rescuing millions of people out of their misery?

I recently had the chance to participate in a series of debates here about this issue organized by Foreign Policy magazine and Letras Libres, a Mexican cultural publication Nothing I heard at that meeting changed my conviction that the glass is half-full despite the doomsayers who predict horrific calamities.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, poverty has been significantly reduced throughout the world. Two hundred years ago, the average income per person worldwide was the equivalent of less than $2 a day; the figure is $17 today. This fact is relevant to the current discussion on globalization because, even though the information technology revolution, biotechnology, the emergence of new world players and outsourcing may give us the impression that we are in the midst of something entirely new, we are simply witnessing a new phase in the process of innovation that is the market economy -- and this began a few hundred years ago.

The fact that 20 percent of the world's population is extremely poor should not make us forget that millions of lives have improved dramatically in the last three decades. Illiteracy has dropped from 44 percent to 18 percent, and only three countries out of a total of 102 included in the U.N.'s Human Development Index have seen their socioeconomic conditions deteriorate. China's economy used to represent one-26th of the average economy of the countries that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; today it represents one-sixth.

These are not arcane facts. They are widely available and easy to understand. Publications such as Indur Goklany's "The Improving State of the World," David Dollar and Aart Kraay's report on the global economy, and Francois Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson's "Inequality Among World Citizens" -- to mention but three among many recent studies -- provide overwhelming evidence that the world is better off thanks to the increased flow of capital, goods, services and ideas.

All of which falls on the face of those who predict that in the next few years we will see a massive concentration of wealth among a few winners who will leave millions of losers behind. While it is probably true that the gap between low-skilled workers and those who are better educated will mean that different people will be impacted in very different ways by the continuing evolution of the global economy, the reality is that even those on the bottom rungs stand to benefit from the worldwide embrace of globalization.

Poverty was the natural condition of all of humanity until the market economy opened up the possibility of ever-increasing productivity. By 2030, it is estimated that the average wealth of developing countries will be equivalent to that of the Czech Republic today ($22,000 per person). The World Bank's recent "Global Economic Prospects" report goes as far as to say that Mexico, Turkey and China will equal Spain's current state of development, which is high.

At the recent meeting in Monterrey, those who were trying to justify their phobia against globalization pointed to Cuba and Venezuela as paradigms of development, and to Mexico's poor in claiming that increased trade -- through the North American Free Trade Agreement -- shortchanges the masses.

In 1953, Cuba's wealth was comparable to that of the state of Mississippi; today, the island's exports total one-third of the sales of Bacardi rum products, the economic icon of the Cuban exile community. Venezuela's economic system is a classic case of state capitalism based on oil -- exactly what made that nation's per-capita income go from representing the equivalent of two-thirds of that of the United States in the 1950s to representing barely 15 percent today. And Mexico's slums are not a factor of that country's increased trade with its North American neighbors, which has quadrupled in the last 15 years, but of the slow pace of reform.

The world was not rich and suddenly turned poor. The progress of the market economy that began to free the world of its shackles continues at an even faster pace today despite the many restrictions still faced by the people who create wealth and exchange it, and despite the fears that these momentous times understandably inspire in those who have difficulty adapting. What a heartening thought.

Friday, October 19, 2007

For whatever reason, liberals value how their views sound and feel over what the actual consequences of them might be. Decade after wearying decade, they look at a problem, identify a solution that sounds good if it were to work, and then refuse to look "under the hood" to actually study what happens when their dumb ideas are put to the test.

Check out this excerpt from a column on this topic. Paul Simon sounds exactly like my tenured university-professor, Lefty friend Paul, whose prescription for all of society's problems is to stick his fingers in his ears, loudly wail "La La La La La La La," and fire government money bombs at a problem if it sounds like a compassionate thing to do. Who cares what actually happens as a result? Democrats love children, our most "vulnerable" and "sweetest" of citizens, and Republicans don't really care about them, right? OK, then case closed.

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The Liberal Compassion MirageBy David LimbaughFriday, October 19, 2007

. . . . President Bush's veto of a proposed expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Programs.

Standing by congressional Democrats in their push to override the veto, singer Paul Simon said with earnest indignation, "The president's veto of the reauthorization of SCHIP appears to be a heartless act. I'm here today to ask those of you who supported the veto to reexamine your conscience, to find compassion in your heart for our most vulnerable and sweetest citizens, our children."

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, the compassionate Simon is obviously unaware that the matter is not as simple as merely throwing money at the problem. To quote House Minority Leader John Boehner, "There are 500,000 kids in America who are eligible for this program who have not been signed up, yet there are some 700,000 adults who are already on the program."

Simon, unlike the Democrats pulling his puppet strings, must not realize that President Bush supports a $5 billion expansion, not reduction, of the program, or that the Democrats' plan goes far beyond providing a safety net to the needy. It would allow states to make coverage available to families with incomes greater than $60,000 a year, which would entice people who can well afford private health insurance to opt for state coverage.

Is it good for the children for Democrats to exploit them as props in their quest to force socialized medicine on this nation, one incremental step at a time? Will the inevitably long waiting lines and substantially reduced quality of care be good for the children?

Why can't congressional Democrats just admit they have a soft spot for socialism: that they believe capitalism results in too much economic disparity and that government -– the Constitution be damned –- should redistribute wealth to suit their ideas of fairness? Never mind that a command-control economy results in a smaller economic pie. What matters is they care, and by gosh, they're willing to forcibly transfer other people's money to prove it. . . ."

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Of all the depressing topics monitored by the Blue Grotto, none makes the Editor want to roll back and forth on a heap of broken glass, dip himself into a vat of rubbing alcohol for maximum stinging, dash across a six lane highway, and then, if still alive, fasten a cinder block to his foot and do a pencil dive into a deep body of water than the whole "university-political-correctness-indoctrination" issue.

Math classes wrestling with issues of race, class, and gender?

Colby College banning "speech that could lead to a loss of self esteem?"

The American university campus is by far the least tolerant, most Orwellian place on earth now, outside of maybe North Korea and Myanmar.

Total crapola!

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Jewish World Review

Oct. 17, 2007

Academic Cesspools

By Walter Williams

The average taxpayer and parents who foot the bill know little about the rot on many college campuses. "Indoctrinate U" is a recently released documentary, written and directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, that captures the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The trailer for "Indoctrinate U" can be seen at www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html.

"Indoctrinate U" starts out with an interview of Professor David Clemens, at Monterey Peninsula College, who reads an administrative directive regarding new course proposals: "Include a description of how course topics are treated to develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues." Clemens is fighting the directive, which applies not to just sociology classes but math, physics, ornamental horticulture and other classes whose subject material has nothing to do with race, class and gender issues.

Professor Noel Ignatiev, of the Massachusetts School of Art, explains that his concern is to do away with whiteness. Why? "Because whiteness is a form of racial oppression." Ignatiev adds, "There cannot be a white race without the phenomenon of white supremacy." What's blackness? According to Ignatiev, "Blackness is an identity that can be plausibly argued to arise out of a resistance to oppression." Bucknell professor Geoff Schneider agrees, saying, "A lot of our students, I think, are unconsciously racist." Both Ignatiev and Schneider are white.

The College of William & Mary and Tufts and Brown universities established racially segregated student orientations. At some universities, students are provided with racially segregated housing, and at others they are treated to racially separate graduation ceremonies.

Under the ruse of ending harassment, a number of universities have established speech codes. Bowdoin College has banned jokes and stories "experienced by others as harassing." Brown University has banned "verbal behavior" that "produces feelings of impotence, anger or disenfranchisement" whether "unintentional or intentional." University of Connecticut has outlawed "inappropriately directed laughter." Colby College has banned any speech that could lead to a loss of self-esteem. "Suggestive looks" are banned at Bryn Mawr College and "unwelcomed flirtations" at Haverford College. Fortunately for students, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has waged a successful war against such speech codes.

Central Connecticut State College set up a panel to discuss slavery reparations. All seven speakers, invited by the school, supported the idea. Professor Jay Bergman questioned the lack of diversity on the panel. In response, two members of the African Studies department published a letter criticizing Bergman, saying, "The protests against reparations stand on the same platform that produced apartheid, Hitler and the KKK." Such a response, as Professor Bergman says, is nothing less than intellectual thuggery.

For universities such as Columbia and Yale, military recruiters are unwelcome, but they welcome terrorists such as Columbia University's invitation to Colonel Mohammar Quadaffi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yale admitted former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a student, despite his fourth-grade education and high school equivalency degree.

On other campuses, such as Lehigh, Central Michigan, Arizona, Holy Cross and California Berkeley universities, administrators banned students, staff and faculty from showing signs of patriotism after the 9/11 attacks. On some campuses, display of the American flag was banned; the pledge of allegiance and singing patriotic songs were banned out of fear of possibly offending foreign students.

Several university officials refused to be interviewed for the documentary. They wanted to keep their campus policies under wraps, not only from reporters but parents as well. When college admissions officials make their recruitment visits, they don't tell parents that their children will learn "whiteness is a form of racial oppression," or that they sponsor racially segregated orientations, dorms and graduation ceremonies. Parents and prospective students are kept in the dark.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (isi.org) has published "Choosing the Right College," to which I've written the introduction. The guide provides a wealth of information to help parents and students choose the right college.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Put yourself in the shoes (probably pretty low-rollin' shoes, I would think), of the Nobel committee choosing the Peace Prize winner for this year, read the following article, and then try to imagine picking Al Gore without bursting out laughing.

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REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Not Nobel WinnersSome nominees for next year.

Sunday, October 14, 2007 12:01 a.m.

In Olso Friday, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to the Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country's military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World.

The prize was also not awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and other Zimbabwe opposition leaders who were arrested and in some cases beaten by police earlier this year while protesting peacefully against dictator Robert Mugabe.

Or to Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in Vietnam arrested this year and sentenced to eight years in prison for helping the pro-democracy group Block 8406.

Or to Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, co-founders of the League of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia, who are waging a modest struggle with grand ambitions to secure basic rights for women in that Muslim country.

Or to Colombian President Àlvaro Uribe, who has fought tirelessly to end the violence wrought by left-wing terrorists and drug lords in his country.

Or to Garry Kasparov and the several hundred Russians who were arrested in April, and are continually harassed, for resisting President Vladimir Putin's slide toward authoritarian rule.

Or to the people of Iraq, who bravely work to rebuild and reunite their country amid constant threats to themselves and their families from terrorists who deliberately target civilians.

Or to Presidents Viktor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili who, despite the efforts of the Kremlin to undermine their young states, stayed true to the spirit of the peaceful "color" revolutions they led in Ukraine and Georgia and showed that democracy can put down deep roots in Russia's backyard.

Or to Britain's Tony Blair, Ireland's Bertie Ahern and the voters of Northern Ireland, who in March were able to set aside decades of hatred to establish joint Catholic-Protestant rule in Northern Ireland.

Or to thousands of Chinese bloggers who run the risk of arrest by trying to bring uncensored information to their countrymen.

Or to scholar and activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, jailed presidential candidate Ayman Nour and other democracy campaigners in Egypt.

Or, posthumously, to lawmakers Walid Eido, Pierre Gemayel, Antoine Ghanem, Rafik Hariri, George Hawi and Gibran Tueni; journalist Samir Kassir; and other Lebanese citizens who've been assassinated since 2005 for their efforts to free their country from Syrian control.

Or to the Reverend Phillip Buck; Pastor Chun Ki Won and his organization, Durihana; Tim Peters and his Helping Hands Korea; and Liberty in North Korea, who help North Korean refugees escape to safety in free nations.

These men and women put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression. Let us hope they survive the coming year so that the Nobel Prize Committee might consider them for the 2008 award.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

I offer here a few selected snippets from an interview with David Harsanyi, author of Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children.

I like the title, because if you're the type of liberal that isn't capable of reading books other than the latest Dr. Phil self-help breakthrough tome, you can still learn something by absorbing the truth of the title.

I had the opportunity within the past week to see a TV interview with an earnest, deadly-serious activist whose tobacco-executive father had died of smoking-related lung cancer. This humorless dud was explaining why he is devoting all of his time to helping enact laws where local governments ban smoking in citizens' own residences.

Zany zealots like this guy get confused when they think of broad generalities of things that are "good" and things that are "bad." Smoking, not wearing your seatbelt, drinking a handle of vodka a day, eating nothing but Big Macs (note: The Blue Grotto nominates that loser who did the documentary Super-Size Me to be launched into space), or never exercising are all things that are "bad." Agreed.

However, we live in the United States, the country to which millions upon millions of people worldwide choose to come to try to better their lives. They don't sacrifice everything to come here because they know that the government will make sure their children eat well, wear their seatbelts, or don't smoke in their homes. They come here because they know that the combination of freedom and the rule of law will give them a better shot at pursuing their dreams here than in any other country on earth. And, they are also free to make poor choices, like sitting on the couch all day, drinking a handle of vodka, and chain-smoking.

My favorite part of the following interview is the analogy to religion. Even God gives humans free will to make right choices or wrong ones! Enjoy!

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Welcome to the Nanny State-- An InterviewBy Bill SteigerwaldTuesday, October 9, 2007

With his book “Nanny State,” Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi has thrown a conservative-libertarian rope around a disturbing political and cultural trend -- the nannification of America by moral busybodies and nitpicking maternalists who use government power to micromanage our personal lives and protect usfrom ourselves. Whether it’s outlawing trans fats in New York City or tag on school playgrounds, Harsanyi says the “nannyists” among us are not only creating a new culture of dependency on government but also eroding what’s left of our individual freedoms. I talked to the author of “Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning American Into a Nation of Children” by phone from his offices in Denver.

Q: What’s “Nanny State” about?

A: It’s about the difference between coercing someone to do the right thing and convincing them to do the right thing. In the Nanny State, we coerce them -- or the government does, at least. All these intrusions -- what we eat, what we smoke, what we watch -- one by one they don’t seem like they are much. But when you bundle them together, you have a movement, and a movement that undermines our freedoms. That’s what the book’s about. . . .

. . .

Q: What are some of your favorite examples of "Nanny State"-ism?

A: These are fun, not serious, for the most part: In New York there was a councilwoman who wanted to ban dangerously sized candy. In Chicago -- and I believe in all of Illinois -- they banned a certain kind of yo-yo because one child almost choked or hung himself, which doesn’t sound too funny; it was funnier when I wrote it, I guess. In Florida there are actually playgrounds that have “No Running” signs. These are things that just make you shake your head. In other places we have people who are advocating for regulations on food portions. So they count out the calories in a restaurant and tell you how much you could eat. And zero-tolerance laws where you can’t have a glass of wine and drive. . . .

. . .

Q: Do you take issue with things like motorcycle helmet laws and seatbelt laws, which are sort of the beginnings of the Nanny State?

A: Yes, I do. I realize the motivation behind seatbelt and helmet laws. It was the first major initiative that told people you are too stupid to take care of yourself and even if you are hurting no one else, we’ve decided you must wear seatbelts and must wear helmets. . . .

. . .

Q: Is this whole petty Nanny State thing a European thing, a socialist thing?

A: It’s a sort of socialism, a sort of collective looking out for each other. It sounds nice, like socialism does on occasion. But I think what we forget sometimes is that a little thing can lead to a big thing. Here in Colorado and elsewhere they wanted to pass “driving while distracted” laws – if you are playing with your radio, they can pull you over. Doesn’t that mean that a cop can pull you over for basically anything whenever they felt like it? They could racially profile if they felt like it. They could do anything they want. That’s what people forget: they are petty laws but in the long run they could become a very big deal.

Let me go back to the socialism thing. I tried to stay away from that, only in the sense that I didn’t want the book to become something partisan. But clearly, clearly, this is a European model we’re headed for -- and that’s a socialist model. . . .

. . . People keep giving me the example about the frog in a pot and you just keep incrementally putting up the heat and then it’s boiling and frog doesn’t even know it. I think we’re almost there. But I don’t see any stop to it, because it’s hard for a politician to get up and defend tobacco, or strippers, or drinking and all those things, even though the underlying argument obviously is freedom of choice and individual choice. But what we’re doing is creating a nation of dependents. Not just as far as welfare programs go, but as far as people believing that government should always protect them, from Katrina all the way down to a kid playing tag. And it’s dangerous. . . .

. . .

Q: Albert J. Nock once wrote that individuals lose the ability to “do the right thing” and develop good moral character if the government outlaws everything.

A: Even in religion, as far as I know, and I’m a lapsed Jew, God gives you the choice. He gives you free will to make the right choice. Without that choice, making the right choice means nothing. I’d always think back when I was writing this book, “What would Thomas Jefferson think about this? What would he think about banning happy hours at pubs? Or telling an Irish immigrant who owns a little pub somewhere that he can’t smoke a cigarette in there -- on his own property?”I think it’s an assault on the American idea. I know that sounds dramatic, because it’s such small inconveniences, but that’s what they are. And then you have to deal with the argument about externalities – “Well, if you smoke, I have to pay for your health care in the end.” Clearly, that’s a slippery slope, because then you can tell me to exercise every day. That never ends. But the more we socialize on a federal level, and clearly that’s coming with health care, then we’re all going to be collectively looking out for each other. That never ends. It’s never-ending right now, and it’s accelerating. Soon we’ll be at the Nanny State. It’s Orwellian. I know people throw around Orwell’s name a lot, but if you read “1984” the protagonist is trying to sneak a cigarette – because small things lead to big things. I think that’s the lesson there, and that’s the lesson I hope this book will convey to people. . . .

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Let's clear something up. When you hear Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, or John Edwards, or Harry Reid, or Chuck Schumer, or Robert Reich, or George Clooney, or Alec Baldwin, or Katie Couric, or Paul Krugman, earnestly declare that they want growth and prosperity for America, there's a footnote that is often missed.

These liberal geniuses only want sunny economic news if produced by their own ill-conceived, deleterious, pernicious, shockingly dumb policies. It would be like only cheering for your team to win if they bunted in the winning run, rather than hit a homer.

Here's some news that, at best, found its way to the back of the section of the New York Times you use in the bottom of the hamster cage: